Light polarization modulation with ferroelectric liquid crystals

Abstract

This article is devoted to the investigation of light modulating properties of ferroelectric liquid crystals (FLCs). In this work two types of FLC modulators are investigated, namely, the modulator with planar alignment of FLCs operating in high frequency V-shaped mode and the modulator based on deformed helix FLC with homeotropic alignment. It was demonstrated, for the modulator of the first type, that the inversion frequency can be as high as 1 kHz due to the optimized structures of the FLC cell. For the modulators of the second type, we theoretically showed that its performance also strongly depends on geometrical properties of the cells. Both types of modulators can find applications in many fields (e.g. telecom, polarimetry, etc.).