Applied Nanophotonics, Liquid Crystals and Biomedical Optics

Liquid crystal phase retarders are utilized by photonic devices and imaging systems for various applications, such as tunable filtering, light modulation, polarimetric imaging, remote sensing and quality inspection. Due to technical difficulties in the manufacturing process, these phase retarders may suffer from spatial non-uniformities, which degrade the performance of the systems. These non-uniformities can be characterized by measuring the spectral transmission at each voltage and each point on the liquid crystal cell, which is time consuming. In this work, we present a new fast and simple method for measuring and computationally estimating the spatial variations of a liquid crystal phase retarder with planar alignment. The method is based on measuring the spectral transmission of the phase retarder at several spatial locations and estimating it at others. The experimental results show that the method provides an accurate spatial description of the phase retarder and can be employed for calibrating relevant systems.