Holography and Information Storage

Liquid Crystal Devices for Beam Steering Applications

“…Usually, the time required for director reorientation to occur (τ on ) depends on the strength of the applied field and material parameters; meanwhile, the time to relax back to the original state (τ off ) is only dependent on the material elasticity. For electric fields, these can be written as [48], (11) and…”

“…Liquid Crystals (LCs) are remarkable electro-optic materials most notably utilized in Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD) [1,2], but increasingly in adaptive optical components. The development of efficient and switchable liquid crystal beam steering devices is a major area of research, as it has a wide range of potential applications, such as headworn displays [3][4][5], smart contact lenses [6][7][8][9], solar cells [10], holography [11] and smart windows [12]. LCs are used widely in the field of adaptive optics due to their refractive index anisotropy, the variety of alignment methods that are available, and the ability of liquid crystals to reorient when subjected to relatively low energy stimuli.…”