All-optical controlling of the focal intensity of a liquid crystal polymer microlens array.

The current work demonstrates a liquid crystalline polymer microlens array (LCP MLA) with an all-optically tunable and multistable focal intensity through photochemical phase transition. The operational mechanism of the optical tuning is associated with the photoisomerization effect. The proposed LCP MLA device has a focusing unit based on a birefringence LCP and a tuning unit with a light responsive material to control the polarization state of the incident probe beam.

Optically-tunable beam steering grating based n azobenzene doped cholesteric liquid crystal.

This work proposes an optically controllable beam-steering device, fabricated using cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) that are doped with azobenzene. The trans-cis photoisomerization of azobenzene changes the pitch of the CLC fingerprint structure and shifts the diffraction angle. The diffraction angle increases when the cell is irradiated with UV light, and restored when it is irradiated with green light.