Liquid Crystal Device Corrects Wavefronts

A multinational team of researchers from P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute, Samara State University and Volga Region National Academy of Information and Telecommunications, all in Samara, Russia, TU Delft in the Netherlands and the University of Durham in the UK has developed a 37-channel liquid crystal modal wavefront corrector with a 30-mm aperture. The device may have applications in ophthalmic imaging, optometry, laser beam forming, optical communications and optical storeage.

The researchers constructed the device with a 25-µm-thick layer of E49 liquid crystal, a rubbed polyimide alignment layer and an ITO low-resistance electrode. They deposited a 21-layer dielectric mirror optimized for 632.8 nm onto a higher-resistance electrode on the rear of the structure and investigated the optical response of the corrector as a function of amplitude and frequency of the voltage supplied. The work is described in the Nov. 4 issue of Optics Express.