54.2: Invited Paper: Flat Liquid Crystal Microlens Based on Spatially‐variant Photoalignment

Abstract

Microlenses have attracted increasing attention in recent years due to the emergent demand in the booming stereoscopic imaging industry and highly integrated optical systems. In this study, we propose a customized approach to design liquid crystal microlens (LCM) for subwavelength focusing, based on the vectorial Rayleigh‐Sommerfeld (VRS) method and the trust region algorithm. It is demonstrated that the computation time and computing resources can be greatly reduced by using our proposal when compared to the commercial software. Both the polarization of the incidence and diffraction field is taken into account in the design, which makes it more reliable. We fabricated the LCM by using photoalignment technology based on the digital micromirror device (DMD), and experimentally characterized the focusing performance of the sample. A Frank‐Oseen model is also established to simulate the mechanical properties of the liquid crystal (LC) layer and analyze the effect of the transition region on the LC directors.