Abstract

A low-aberration hole-patterned-electrodes (HPE) liquid crystal (LC) lens with positive and negative focal lengths is demonstrated in this Letter by using four hybrid-aligned nematic LC layers filled with dual-frequency LC materials. The diopter can be controlled from the positive lens (${{0}}\;{\rm{D}} \sim {1.1}\;{\rm{D}}$) to the negative lens (${{0}}\;{\rm{D}} \sim$ ${-}{1.25}\;{\rm{D}}$). The aberration is analyzed using the Zernike polynomial, and the wavefront optical path difference is improved from ${{2}}\lambda$ for the conventional one-layer HPE LC lens to less than ${0.25}\lambda$ for our proposed LC lens. The proposed LC lens does not require the use of a polarizer, increasing the optical efficiency two times compared with the conventional LC lens.

© 2020 Optical Society of America

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