Frank Sandmeyer

Active Liquid Crystal Devices Incorporating Liquid Crystal Polymer Thin Film Waveplates

A method of fabricating active liquid crystal (LC) devices incorporating liquid crystal polymer (LCP) films with passivation layers in combination with conventional LC monomers is presented. Unlike monomeric LC waveplates, LCP waveplate stacks can be produced on a single substrate. Furthermore, the passivation layer is shown to act as an effective alignment and protective layer for LC monomers and LCPs, thus enabling the assembly of variable LC components with integrated thin film LCP waveplates in an LC cell configuration. Such active devices with thin film waveplate stacks are useful in applications such as tunable wavelength filters for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) communication systems. The device fabrication method is used to produce a single-unit, double-pass, polarization-insensitive variable LC phase modulator (LCPM).