Chirality, tailored by external morphology and internal composition, has been realized by controlled curved-lattice epitaxial growth of In(x)Al(1-x)N nanospirals. The curved morphology of the spiral segments is a result of a lateral compositional gradient while maintaining a preferred crystallographic growth direction, implying a lateral gradient in optical properties. Individual nanospirals show an asymmetric core-shell structure with curved basal planes. Mueller matrix spectroscopic ellipsometry shows that the tailored chirality is manifested in the polarization state of light reflected off the nanospirals.

Tunable liquid crystal light deflecting devices based on nonuniform anchoring energy are proposed. These devices have uniform thicknesses of the layers they are composed of, and beam deviation is controlled with a uniform electrical field. Potential applicability of such an approach in beam deflectors and active lenses is investigated. It is shown that the approach is a competitive alternative to liquid crystal light deflecting devices, in which the needed spatial distribution of liquid crystal molecules is achieved either due to nonuniform thickness or due to generation of nonuniform electrical field.

Original Publication: Sergiy Valyukh, Iryna Valyukh, V Chigrinov, H S Kwok and Hans Arwin, Liquid crystal light deflecting devices based on nonuniform anchoring, 2010, APPLIED PHYSICS LETTERS, (97), 23, 231120. http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3526311 Copyright: American Institute of Physics http://www.aip.org/

The study of a tunable liquid crystal lens having a uniform cell gap, uniform applied voltage and non‐uniform anchoring energy was done. Optimal parameters of such a lens were found and discussed. We demonstrated that producing a desired director gradient profile with non‐uniform spatial distribution of the anchoring energy is a good alternative for other known methods applied for liquid crystal lenses.

In this paper we discuss a new dynamic drive scheme for bistable reflective cholesteric liquid crystal displays with high multiplexing level. Only two voltage levels (U and 0) are used for the addressing in this drive scheme. Addressing speed is about the time of the fast transition of a cholesteric liquid crystal from the homeotropic state to the transient planar state per line. The maximum value of using voltage is slightly overtop the critical voltage of a cholesteric-nematic transition. These facts make this drive scheme very perspective in application for such kind of displays.

Among the important features of holographic displays are the wide viewing angles and the full color of the reconstructed images. The present work focuses on achievement of both features. We propose an increased-viewing-angle full-color holographic display using two tiled phase-only spatial light modulators (SLMs), a 4f concave mirrors system, and a temporal-spatial multiplexing method. The 4f optical system consists of two concave mirrors and serves to increase the viewing angle. A temporal-spatial multiplexing synchronization control (TSMSC) method is developed to achieve a full-color image and to remove the color crosstalk of the image. We calculate RGB phase-only holograms of a computer-generated color pyramid by using a slice-based Fresnel diffraction algorithm. The experimental results indicate that the proposed display system is feasible to reconstruct a full-color holographic 3D image with a viewing angle of 12.8°, which is about 3.8 times wider than the viewing angle formed by a single SLM.