Microlenses and microlens arrays are one of the indispensable components in modern optical systems ranging from imaging and beam shaping to polarization control and switchable 2D/3D displays. Among them, the liquid crystal microlenses (LCMs) with size below 1 mm have attracted more and more attention due to their stimuli‐responsiveness and tunability in focal length and polarization. Compared with microlenses based on inorganic binary optics, diffractive optical elements, or metasurface, LCMs are more cost‐effective and can be easily tuned. In this paper, an in‐depth review of the design principles, fabrication techniques, emerging applications, and recent advances of LCMs and arrays is presented, aiming to clarify the characteristics, limitations, and challenges in LCMs design and fabrication. This review may provide directions for solving those challenges, and expand the applications of LCMs.
Microlens arrays (MLAs) based on the selective wetting have opened new avenues for developing compact and miniaturized imaging and display techniques with ultrahigh resolution beyond the traditional bulky and volumetric optics. However, the selective wetting lenses explored so far have been constrained by the lack of precisely defined pattern for highly controllable wettability contrast, thus limiting the available droplet curvature and numerical aperture, which is a major challenge towards the practical high-performance MLAs. Here we report a mold-free and self-assembly approach of mass-production of scalable MLAs, which can also have ultrasmooth surface, ultrahigh resolution, and the large tuning range of the curvatures. The selective surface modification based on tunable oxygen plasma can facilitate the precise pattern with adjusted chemical contrast, thus creating large-scale microdroplets array with controlled curvature. The numerical aperture of the MLAs can be up to 0.26 and precisely tuned by adjusting the modification intensity or the droplet dose. The fabricated MLAs have high-quality surface with subnanometer roughness and allow for record-high resolution imaging up to equivalently 10,328 ppi, as we demonstrated. This study shows a cost-effective roadmap for mass-production of high-performance MLAs, which may find applications in the rapid proliferating integral imaging industry and high-resolution display.
Microlenses have attracted increasing attention in recent years due to the emergent demand in the booming stereoscopic imaging industry and highly integrated optical systems. In this study, we propose a customized approach to design liquid crystal microlens (LCM) for subwavelength focusing, based on the vectorial Rayleigh‐Sommerfeld (VRS) method and the trust region algorithm. It is demonstrated that the computation time and computing resources can be greatly reduced by using our proposal when compared to the commercial software. Both the polarization of the incidence and diffraction field is taken into account in the design, which makes it more reliable. We fabricated the LCM by using photoalignment technology based on the digital micromirror device (DMD), and experimentally characterized the focusing performance of the sample. A Frank‐Oseen model is also established to simulate the mechanical properties of the liquid crystal (LC) layer and analyze the effect of the transition region on the LC directors.
Microlens arrays (MLAs) based on the selective wetting have opened new avenues for developing compact and miniaturized imaging and display techniques with ultrahigh resolution beyond the traditional bulky and volumetric optics. However, the selective wetting lenses explored so far have been constrained by the lack of precisely defined pattern for highly controllable wettability contrast, thus limiting the available droplet curvature and numerical aperture, which is a major challenge towards the practical high-performance MLAs. Here we report a mold-free and self-assembly approach of mass-production of scalable MLAs, which can also have ultrasmooth surface, ultrahigh resolution, and the large tuning range of the curvatures. The selective surface modification based on tunable oxygen plasma can facilitate the precise pattern with adjusted chemical contrast, thus creating large-scale microdroplets array with controlled curvature. The numerical aperture of the MLAs can be up to 0.3 and precisely tuned by adjusting the modification intensity or the droplet dose. The fabricated MLAs have high-quality surface with subnanometer roughness and allow for record-high resolution resolution imaging up to equivalently 2116 ppi, as we demonstrated. This study shows a cost-effective roadmap for mass-production of high-performance MLAs, which may find applications in the rapid proliferating integral imaging industry and high-resolution display.
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