Abstract

In this Letter, we experimentally demonstrate liquid crystal-based moiré lenses with a wide and tunable focal length by direct-writing photoalignment. Our moiré lenses, which consist of two cascaded diffractive optical elements, have a large range of refractive power between $\pm 0.85\;{{\rm m}^{- 1}}$ at 532 nm and a mutual rotation between $\pm 90^\circ$ with high diffraction efficiency ($\gt\!{75}\%$). Based on the as-designed moiré lenses, we propose high-dynamic-resolution optical edge detection without any axial shift or substitution of components. The minimum edge width is 13.2 µm and can be adjusted within 100 µm by mutual rotation of this device, which has great potential to be used in adaptive and compact optical systems.

© 2021 Optical Society of America

Enhanced optical edge detection based on a Pancharatnam–Berry flat lens with a large focal length

Ting Li, Yang Yang, Xinyang Liu, Yan Wu, Yuan Zhou, Sijia Huang, Xiaochun Li, and Huihui Huang
Opt. Lett. 45(13) 3681-3684 (2020)

Optical edge detection with adjustable resolution based on cascaded Pancharatnam–Berry lenses

Yingnan Tu, Ruijian Li, Zhenyu Xiong, Hao Wu, Yuan Ren, Zhengliang Liu, Rusheng Sun, and Tong Liu
Opt. Lett. 48(14) 3801-3804 (2023)

Rotationally tunable multi-focal diffractive moiré lenses

Shima Gharbi Ghebjagh, Arne Behrens, Patrick Feßer, and Stefan Sinzinger
Appl. Opt. 60(17) 5145-5152 (2021)

Demonstration of focus-tunable diffractive Moiré-lenses

Stefan Bernet, Walter Harm, and Monika Ritsch-Marte
Opt. Express 21(6) 6955-6966 (2013)

Tunable multi-mode laser based on robust cholesteric liquid crystal microdroplet

Hongbo Lu, Jianzhou Shi, Qi Wang, Yingying Xue, Le Yang, Miao Xu, Jun Zhu, Longzhen Qiu, Yunsheng Ding, and Junxi Zhang
Opt. Lett. 46(19) 5067-5070 (2021)