Abstract
Liquid crystal phase retarders are utilized by photonic devices and imaging systems for various applications, such as tunable filtering, light modulation, polarimetric imaging, remote sensing and quality inspection. Due to technical difficulties in the manufacturing process, these phase retarders may suffer from spatial non-uniformities, which degrade the performance of the systems. These non-uniformities can be characterized by measuring the spectral transmission at each voltage and each point on the liquid crystal cell, which is time consuming. In this work, we present a new fast and simple method for measuring and computationally estimating the spatial variations of a liquid crystal phase retarder with planar alignment. The method is based on measuring the spectral transmission of the phase retarder at several spatial locations and estimating it at others. The experimental results show that the method provides an accurate spatial description of the phase retarder and can be employed for calibrating relevant systems.
Highlights
Liquid crystal phase retarders, whether in single pixel or pixelated formats, besides their traditional use in displays, are used in many non-display applications [1] such as photonic devices [2] and imaging systems of different purposes
In this paper, we have presented a simple method to estimate the spatial nonuniformity of a liquid crystal cell (LCC) with planar alignment and its effect on the spectral transmission (ST) of the cell
The compressive sensing (CS)-MUSI system and its polarizerLCC-analyzer subsystem were illuminated with a halogen light source at several locations while applying different voltages to the cell
Summary
Whether in single pixel or pixelated formats, besides their traditional use in displays, are used in many non-display applications [1] such as photonic devices [2] and imaging systems of different purposes. An additional method is to translate the LCC to perform measurements at different spatial locations and use prior information about the properties of the LCC for spatial variations estimation [11] Another approach, given that the birefringence of the liquid crystal material is known, is to measure the cell gap at a single location by using a rotating polarizer method [12], or a rotating quarter-wave retarder method [13]. The downside to this approach is that it demands rotating optical components in order to achieve the spatial characterization and that performing such measurements at many locations could be very time consuming These types of measurements are usually performed with no voltage applied to the LCC, while its retardation spectrum is voltage-dependent.
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