Transversely excited liquid crystal cells

Gary Cook; Jason P. Duignan; Lesley L. Taylor

doi:10.1117/12.452742

16 January 2002 Transversely excited liquid crystal cells

Gary Cook, Jason P. Duignan, Lesley L. Taylor

Proceedings Volume 4462, Nonlinear Optical Transmission Processes and Organic Photorefractive Materials; (2002) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.452742
Event: International Symposium on Optical Science and Technology, 2001, San Diego, CA, United States

Abstract

The integration of photorefractive liquid crystal beam coupling devices into optical systems is often hampered by the need to tilt the liquid crystal cells to high angles of incidence in order to obtain efficient beam coupling. Owing to poor charge diffusion in most liquid crystal systems, charge migration depends mainly on an externally applied drift field. Conventional cells, with electrodes applied to the surfaces of the windows, therefore need to be tilted with respect to the incident light to enable a component of the applied electric field to appear along the direction of the optical grating k-vector. This paper reports on an alternative design in which the electric field is applied transversely, enabling devices to be presented at normal incidence to the system optical propagation direction. We demonstrate the optical gain from transversely excited homeotropic liquid crystal cells is very similar to that obtainable with conventional homeotropic cells, with the added unexpected advantage of an order of magnitude increase in speed.

Citation Download Citation

Gary Cook, Jason P. Duignan, and Lesley L. Taylor "Transversely excited liquid crystal cells", Proc. SPIE 4462, Nonlinear Optical Transmission Processes and Organic Photorefractive Materials, (16 January 2002); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.452742

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