Design and Realization of a Compact Efficient Beam Combiner, Based on Liquid Crystal Pancharatnam–Berry Phase Gratings

We demonstrate a laser beam combiner based on four photo-patterned Pancharatnam–Berry (PB) phase gratings, which is compact and has high diffraction efficiency for incident circularly polarized light. The nematic liquid crystal mixture E7 is used as anisotropic material, and the thickness of the lay...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inCrystals (Basel) Vol. 11; no. 2; p. 220
Main Authors Gao, Boxuan, Beeckman, Jeroen, Neyts, Kristiaan
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.02.2021
Subjects
Beam combiners
Circular polarization
diffraction
Diffraction efficiency
Diodes
Efficiency
etendue reduction
geometric phase grating
Glass substrates
laser beam combiner
Laser beams
Lasers
Light
Liquid crystals
Nematic crystals
Polarized light
Thickness
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Summary:We demonstrate a laser beam combiner based on four photo-patterned Pancharatnam–Berry (PB) phase gratings, which is compact and has high diffraction efficiency for incident circularly polarized light. The nematic liquid crystal mixture E7 is used as anisotropic material, and the thickness of the layer is controlled by spacers. The beam combiner can bring two parallel laser beams closer to each other while remaining parallel. This work shows the potential to realize components based on flat optical LC devices.
ISSN:2073-4352
2073-4352
DOI:10.3390/cryst11020220