Design And Fabrication Of Electrically Tuanble Liquid Crystal Microlens

The optical properties of common optical lenses including the focal length and whether theoptical path can be diverged or converged by them, are fixed. The electrically tunable liquid crystalmicrolenses (ETLCMs), as one of the new type of optical components, demonstrate some specialelectro-optical properties. Through changing the signal voltage applied over on the ETLCMs'electrodes, the spatial arrangement of the liquid crystal (LC) molecules can be varied and thus thespatial distribution of the refractive index of them changed, so as to show particular optical properties.The optical properties of the same piece of ETLCMs can be changed by variance the controllingvoltage of ETLCMs, including presenting different focal length, and changing the spatial distributionstate of light beams such as beam divergence or convergence, and even swing the focus over the focalplane of ETLCMs. The optical proprieties mentioned above are very important to those applications,for instance, high performance imaging detection, locating, tracing and locking multi-objects.Based on the molecular-size liquid crystal structures, the recent research advance and the resultsabout ETLCMs are summarized, and then the common optical performances of electrically tunableLC molecule are analyzed, and thus several typical ETLCMs are fabricated, and finally the commonoptical performances of the fabricated ETLCMs are measured and analyzed.The experimental results show that the designed ETLCMs can used to effectively performelectrically tunable focusing and further the tuning of the focal length of them. Through changing thedistance between the ETLCMs and the CCD camera employed and further modulating the voltageapplied over ETLCMs, the remarkable variance of ETLCMs'focal length can be viewed significantly.To electrically swing focus microlenses, through simultaneously adjusting the voltages applied overpartial separated electrodes of ETLCMs with fixed focal plane, the function of orderly swing focusformed over the focal plane of ETLCMs can be realized effectively.