Design and Fabrication of High-Performance Liquid Crystal Gratings

We present basic principles of designing and fabricating high-performance liquid crystal (LC) gratings with binary alignment structures which produce a variety of the diffraction properties. The periodic binary structure in the LC layer was fabricated through a selective irradiation of the UV light using the single-masking process. An alternating homeotropic and hybrid alignment configuration produces the input polarization-dependent diffraction suitable for the polarization-separating devices while an oppositely twisted binary alignment configuration gives the input polarization-insensitive diffraction. It is found that a dye-doped bidirectional alignment configuration can be used for obtaining optically controllable polarization properties.

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