A new approach to a tunable Pancharatnam phase beam steering device is proposed that can steer NIR light to angles greater than 10 degrees with greater than 80% efficiency.
12530 This conference presentation was prepared for the Advanced Optics for Imaging Applications: UV through LWIR VIII conference at SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing 2023
Two methods for designing a continuous optical beam steering device are to use a linear phase profile based on physical optical pathlength (OPL) , and based on Pancharatnam phase (PP) . There are challenges with both of these basic approaches when considering design goals of high steering angle range, resolution, speed, and efficiency. In this overview talk, a comparison will be made between these two approaches with regard to these design goals. The limiting effects on each of these design goals will be considered with detailed FDTD optical modeling, and compared with experimental measurements.
A new design is developed for a non-mechanical, tunable Pancharatnam phase based optical beam steering device that drastically improves the steering resolution for large angles (up to 11°). A fringe field switching structure is used to construct a Pancharatnam phase, an in-plane spiral pattern with a given pitch length, in a liquid crystal cell. The pitch length of a Pancharatnam phase device is the length along the aperture corresponding to a phase increase of one wave. A design utilizing neighboring pitch lengths of different sizes achieves a steering angle corresponding to the average length of the neighboring pitches. The alternating pitch length design is advantageous to the resolution of the device because the length of a single pitch is restricted to an integer number of electrodes in the fringe field switching structure. By implementing the new alternating pitch design, the pitch length can change by a smaller non-integer number of electrodes resulting in finer steering.
Pancharatnam Phase Devices (PPDs) are an exciting new area for optical component development. Single layer active devices that provide optical beam steering over a range of several degrees will be discussed. The devices considered here use a comb electrode structure to provide an in-plane electric field to control the optical axis orientation of the liquid crystal director to have the desired spiral pattern of a PPD device. Two basic concepts will be discussed: one that used the in-plane fields to “pin” the only the ends of the spiral pattern; and another that uses sub elements to defines the desired director orientation at several locations in the spiral. The concepts, design details, and modeling results are shown.
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