Waveplate lenses and methods for their fabrication
AssigneesBeam Engineering for Advanced Measurements Co., The United States of America as represented by the Secretary of the Army
InventorsNelson Tabirian, Svetlana Serak, Diane Steeves, Brian Kimball
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Abstract
The invention provides for lenses fabricated as planar thin film coatings with continuous structure. The lensing action is due to optical axis orientation modulation in the plane of the lens. The lenses of the current invention are fabricated using photoalignment of a liquid crystal polymer wherein the polarization pattern of radiation used for photoalignment is obtained by propagating the light through an optical system comprising a shape-variant nonlinear spatial light polarization modulators.
Claims20
An optical film comprising a birefringent material, the optical axis orientation angle of said material being a nonlinear function of coordinates in the plane of the film.
A method for fabricating diffractive waveplate optics of nonlinear phase modulation profile comprising:
- (a) providing a substrate;
- (b) dispensing a photoaligning material layer over said substrate;
- (c) providing a light source with wavelength in the absorption band of said photoalignment material;
- (d) propagating said beam through polarization control optics comprising a polarization converter outputting a spatially nonlinear distribution of linear polarization;
- (e) further propagating said beam through an optical projection system;
- (f) exposing said photoaligning material layer to said light beam at the output of said optical projection system.
- (g) dispensing a polymerizable liquid crystal precursor over the photoaligned material layer;
- (h) in-situ reacting said polymerizable liquid crystal to form a polymer film.
An imaging system comprising at least one waveplate-lens film.
An optical film made of a liquid crystalline material between substrates inducing different orientation states, including a combination of planar alignment and a spatially nonlinear alignment pattern.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.