Liquid crystal depolarizer based on photoalignment technology

Abstract

We propose a depolarizer based on the principle of a collection of half-wave plates with randomly distributed optic axes. The design is demonstrated by means of dynamically photopatterning liquid crystal into randomly aligned homogeneous domains. We characterize the liquid crystal depolarizer for 1550 nm and C-band (1520–1610 nm). A degree of polarization of less than 5% is obtained for any linearly polarized light. This study provides a practical candidate for high-performance depolarizers.