Nonmechanical programmable image rotator with Glan-Thompson prism

We present a non-mechanical, dynamically programmable, all-optical image rotator, which can rotate an input image to any angle or a grid given by 360°/2n, where n is the number of stages. The image rotator uses cascaded stages in which each stage rotates the image by an angle given by half the previous stage. Each stage uses an Ferroelectric Liquid Crystal (FLC) polarization switch to select between a straight through path and a deflected path with an odd number of bounces, that when rotated to an angle, operates as an image rotating prism. An FLC is used for each stage to choose the polarization and therefore whether to rotate the image or not. By switching the FLC director orientation by 45 for each stage, images can be rotated to an arbitrary angle at a speed of several KHz.