Add to BibSonomy
Abstract
This study reports the effect of the surface anchoring energy of a liquid crystal (LC) cell on the performance of the liquid crystal optical waveguide polarization rotator (LCOW-PR) for the purpose of providing a theoretical reference for practical preparation of the LCOW-PR. First, the expression for the deflection angle of the director at the boundary of the LC cell is derived so that the distributions of the director and dielectric tensor of the LC can be accurately solved under any anchoring energy. On this basis, the correlation between the crucial indicators such as the polarization conversion length (PCL) together with the polarization conversion efficiency (PCE) of the LCOW-PR and the anchoring effect strength is constructed by combining with the existing numerical algorithms. The numerical results show that the maximum variation of the PCL is lower than 0.1 µm as the anchoring effect strength increases from ${1} \times {{10}^{- 6}}\;{\rm J}/{{\rm m}^2}$ to ${1} \times {{10}^{- 3}}\;{\rm J}/{{\rm m}^2}$, while the PCE decreases from 99.72% to 78.33%. This implies that the PCL of the LCOW-PR does not depend on the surface anchoring energy, but the anchoring effect strength of the orientational layer must be controlled to the order of ${{10}^{- 6}}\;{\rm J}/{{\rm m}^2}$ or even lower to achieve high-performance conversion between the polarization modes. Simultaneously, the effectiveness of the calculations in this work is verified with the help of the coupled mode theory as well as a comparison to previous reports.
© 2024 Optica Publishing Group
Full Article | PDF ArticleMore Like This
Bingru Zhang, Malte Plidschun, Markus A. Schmidt, and Heinz-S. Kitzerow
Opt. Mater. Express 13(12) 3467-3480 (2023)
Tomoyuki Sasaki, Takashi Shoho, Tran Minh Tien, Kohei Goto, Moritsugu Sakamoto, Kohei Noda, Nobuhiro Kawatsuki, and Hiroshi Ono
Opt. Mater. Express 6(8) 2521-2529 (2016)
Rajratan Basu
Appl. Opt. 58(24) 6678-6683 (2019)