Fabrication and Application of Absorption-Based and Interference-Based Micropolarizers

Abstract

The ability to create arbitrary patterned linear, circular, and elliptical liquid crystal polymer polarizers is demonstrated in this work. The operating wavelength of the thin-film polarizer ranges from 400 to 4200 nm. The linear absorption-based micropolarizer is fabricated using dichroic dye as a guest in liquid crystal polymer host with feature sizes as small as 4 µm. The circular interference-based micropolarizer is fabricated using cholesteric liquid crystal polymers with feature sizes as small as 6.2 µm. The elliptical micropolarizer is achieved using the combination of a microretarder and a micropolarizer. The chemistry, fabrication process, spatial resolution and optical properties of micropolarizers are presented. Alignments of liquid crystal polymers and cholesteric liquid crystal polymers are both achieved using photoalignment technique with polarized photo-lithography. Two different methods, thermal annealing and solvent rinse, are utilized for patterning cholesteric liquid crystal polymers over large areas. In addition to exploring absorption-based and interference-based micropolarizers, arrays of micropolarizers are fabricated for the construction of 580nm and 760nm division-of-focal-plane full-Stokes imaging polarimeters. The polarimeter utilizes a set of four optimized measurements which represent a regular tetrahedron inscribed in the Poincaré sphere. Results from the device fabrication, instrument calibration and characterization for the 580 nm polarimeter are presented. The optimized imaging polarimeter can be used for sampling the polarization signature across a scene with a resolution of 1608 x 1208 x 14-bit at 20 frames/second.