動的パターン光による偏光回折格子の作製と回折特性の評価

抄録

The control of molecular alignment and structural pattern in liquid crystals is crucial for developing high-performance optical devices. Especially, the control of two-dimensional molecular alignment attracted much attention as a technology to generate new optical performance which is difficult to evolve in one-dimensional molecular alignment such as high efficiency polarization gratings and a vortex converter. Photoalignment process is known as a practical method to induce two-dimensional molecular alignment. The molecular alignment direction is determined by the direction of linearly polarized light. Therefore, one can generate arbitrary two-dimensional molecular alignment by controlling the direction of linear polarization. Polarization holography that applies photoalignment process is mostly used in fabricating the polarization gratings. In this technique, the interference of two coherent writing beams with circularly orthogonal polarizations induces the periodic change of molecular alignment. Recently, we have proposed a novel method to align liquid crystals, which can generate molecular alignment by design of the shape and the motion of incident light. In this study, we fabricate cycloidal aligned films, and analyzed their optical properties.