Fast Method for Liquid Crystal Cell Spatial Variations Estimation Based on Modeling the Spectral Transmission
Shauli Shmilovich,
Liat Revah,
Yaniv Oiknine,
Isaac August,
Ibrahim Abdulhalim,
Adrian Stern
Affiliations
Shauli Shmilovich
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O.B. 653, Beer-Sheva 8410501, Israel
Liat Revah
Department of Electro-Optics and Photonics Engineering, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O.B. 653, Beer-Sheva 8410501, Israel
Yaniv Oiknine
Department of Electro-Optics and Photonics Engineering, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O.B. 653, Beer-Sheva 8410501, Israel
Isaac August
Department of Electro-Optics and Photonics Engineering, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O.B. 653, Beer-Sheva 8410501, Israel
Ibrahim Abdulhalim
Department of Electro-Optics and Photonics Engineering, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O.B. 653, Beer-Sheva 8410501, Israel
Adrian Stern
Department of Electro-Optics and Photonics Engineering, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O.B. 653, Beer-Sheva 8410501, Israel
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.
