Fabrication of a Fabry-Perot-type Patterned Polarizer for Liquid Crystals Photoalignment

Abstract

Patterned alignment of liquid crystals has been studied actively in recent years to control the behavior of light. The photoalignment method currently used for liquid crystal alignment can easily achieve uniform alignment by linearly polarized light irradiation but it is not easy to produce patterned alignment with a single exposure. In this study, we show that a Fabry-Perot resonator in which a pattern-oriented uniaxially anisotropic medium is introduced functions as a filter to obtain a linearly polarized light distribution reflecting the introduced pattern. We show that the filtered light can be used for photoalignment, making the proposed structure potentially useful as photoalignment exposure masks.