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Abstract Liquid crystals offer a dynamic platform for developing advanced photonics and soft actuation systems due to their unique and facile tunability and reconfigurability. Achieving precise spatial patterning of the liquid crystal alignment is critical to developing electro‐optical devices, programmable origami, directed colloidal assembly, and controlling active matter. Here, a simple method is demonstrated to achieve continuous 3D control of the directions of liquid crystal mesogens using a two‐step photo‐exposure process. In the first step, polarized light sets the orientation in the plane of confining substrates; the second step uses unpolarized light of a prescribed dose to set the out‐of‐plane orientation. The method enables smoothly varying orientational patterns with sub‐micrometer precision. As a demonstration, the setup is used to create gradient‐index lenses with parabolic refractive index profiles that remain stable without external electric fields. The lenses' focal length and sensitivity to light polarization are characterized through experimental and numerical methods. The findings pave the way for developing next‐generation photonic devices and actuated materials, with potential applications in molecular self‐assembly, re‐configurable optics, and responsive matter.
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LCPOM: Precise Reconstruction of Polarized Optical Microscopy Images of Liquid Crystals
When viewed with a cross-polarized optical microscope (POM), liquid crystals display interference colors and complex patterns that depend on the material's microscopic orientation. That orientation can be manipulated by application of external fields, which provides the basis for applications in optical display and sensing technologies. The color patterns themselves have a high information content. Traditionally, however, calculations of the optical appearance of liquid crystals have been performed by assuming that a single-wavelength light source is employed, and reported in a monochromatic scale. In this work, the original Jones matrix method is extended to calculate the colored images that arise when a liquid crystal is exposed to a multi-wavelength source. By accounting for the material properties, the visible light spectrum and the CIE color matching functions, we demonstrate that the proposed approach produces colored POM images that are in quantitative agreement with experimental data. Results are presented for a variety of systems, including radial, bipolar, and cholesteric droplets, where results of simulations are compared to experimental microscopy images. The effects of droplet size, topological defect structure, and droplet orientation are examined systematically. The technique introduced here generates images that can be directly compared to experiments, thereby facilitating machine learning efforts aimed at interpreting LC microscopy images, and paving the way for the inverse design of materials capable of producing specific internal microstructures in response to external stimuli.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2146428
- PAR ID:
- 10486359
- Publisher / Repository:
- arXiv, Cond-Mat
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- arXivorg
- ISSN:
- 2331-8422
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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