Fabrication of ideal geometric-phase holograms with arbitrary wavefronts
By Jihwan Kim, Yanming Li, M. Miskiewicz, C. Oh, Michael W. Kudenov, M. Escuti. 2015
329 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Throughout optics and photonics, phase is normally controlled via an optical path difference. Although much less common, an alternative means for phase control exists: a geometric phase (GP) shift occurring when a light wave is transformed through one parameter space, e.g., polarization, in such a way as to create a change in a second parameter, e.g., phase. In thin films and surfaces where only the GP varies spatially—which may be called GP holograms (GPHs)—the phase profile of nearly any (physical or virtual) object can in principle be embodied as an inhomogeneous anisotropy manifesting exceptional diffraction and polarization behavior. Pure GP elements have had poor efficiency and utility up to now, except in isolated cases, due to the lack of fabrication techniques producing elements with an arbitrary spatially varying GP shift at visible and near-infrared wavelengths. Here, we describe two methods to create high-fidelity GPHs, one interferometric and another direct-write, capable of recording the wavefront of nearly any physical or virtual object. We employ photoaligned liquid crystals to record the patterns as an inhomogeneous optical axis profile in thin films with a few μm thickness. We report on eight representative examples, including a GP lens with F/2.3 (at 633 nm) and 99% diffraction efficiency across visible wavelengths, and several GP vortex phase plates with excellent modal purity and remarkably small central defect size (e.g., 0.7 and 7 μm for topological charges of 1 and 8, respectively). We also report on a GP Fourier hologram, a fan-out grid with dozens of far-field spots, and an elaborate phase profile, which showed excellent fidelity and very low leakage wave transmittance and haze. Together, these techniques are the first practical bases for arbitrary GPHs with essentially no loss, high phase gradients (∼rad/μm), novel polarization functionality, and broadband behavior.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f323046bcd2e162aea1fdfbf89f0f0a1bd34680b
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
Citations in the corpus
- Liquid Crystal Beam Steering Devices: Principles, Recent Advances, and Future Developments (2019, methodology): “To fabricate PBDs, polarization holography [68,69] and photo-alignment methods [70] are usually applied to transfer the linearly rotating polarization pattern to the LC director orientation.”
- Recent progress in Pancharatnam–Berry phase optical elements and the applications for virtual/augmented realities (2017, methodology): “Pancharatnam−Berry phase optical elements (PBOEs) [16–36], also known as cycloidal diffractive waveplates (CDWs), are essentially patterned half-wave plates with spatially varying crystal-axis orientation (director).”
- Advanced liquid crystal devices for augmented reality and virtual reality displays: principles and applications (2022, unknown): “Similar to a PB phase grating, the PB phase based LC lens (PB lens) 161,182,183 is also a polarization selective optical element.”
- Matrix Fourier optics enables a compact full-Stokes polarization camera (2019, background): “Work of this nature now has an extensive literature across several disciplines of optics under various names, including diffractive optics (1, 2), polarization holography (3–6), and nanophotonics (metasurfaces) (7, 8), in addition to appreciable attention from the liquid crystal community (9, 10).”