Liquid crystal filled diffraction gratings

Liquid crystal technology is becoming increasingly important for flat displays in electronics, computers and TV. Most liquid crystal displays currently made have as their basic unit, two flat surfaces each coated with a transparent, conductive layer, between which a thin layer of liquid crystals is sandwiched. The work detailed in this dissertation is based on a modification of the basic liquid crystal unit and studies the properties of structures which consist of certain anisotropic liquid crystals confined between a flat substrate and a corrugated one, each substrate being transparent and having a thin trans-parent conductive coating. Without an applied electric field, the refractive indices of the liquid crystal and corrugated substrate do not match, and thus strong diffraction occurs. When an electric field is applied to the device, the liquid crystals are re-oriented so that the refractive indices now match, and the device behaves as a uniform slab of homogeneous material producing no diffraction. Rigorous coupled wave analysis was developed to design the ideal devices and analyze the performance of our experimental ones. 99% diffraction efficiencies in single wavelength polarized illumination are shown to be possible with this class of devices. The best device we fabricated showed a 62% distraction efficiency, as our fabrication process roughened the top surface of the device so that (≃30%) of the incident light was lost to scatter. Several new fabrication processes are proposed to eliminate this scatter problem, and that details of fabrication processes thus far attempted are outlined.