Liquid crystal lens array with positive and negative focal lengths.

Area of Science:

• Optics
• Materials Science
• Electrical Engineering

Background:

• Liquid crystal lenses offer tunable optical properties.
• Existing designs often face challenges in fabrication complexity and performance control.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and experimentally demonstrate a positive-negative tunable liquid crystal lens array with enhanced performance and simplified fabrication.
• To achieve a parabolic phase profile across the entire focusing range.

Main Methods:

• Designing a novel electrode structure with two units for parabolic voltage generation and homogeneous distribution.
• Fabricating a liquid crystal lens array (30 µm LC layer, 1.0 mm individual lens size) using a single lithographic step.
• Controlling the voltage difference to ensure linear liquid crystal phase response.

Main Results:

• The fabricated lens array exhibited a phase profile matching the desired parabolic profile during focus tuning.
• The lens array demonstrated good focusing effects for positive lens operation.
• Experimental results were consistent with theoretical analyses, confirming high-quality performance.

Conclusions:

• A high-quality, tunable liquid crystal lens array with a positive-negative focus capability has been successfully demonstrated.
• The proposed electrode design offers advantages in fabrication simplicity, compact size, low voltage requirements, and versatile driving modes.