2023/11/08 by Alicia Sit, Francesco Di Colandrea, Sit, Alicia +5
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Liquid Crystal Research Advancements #Optics (physics.optics) #Orbital Angular Momentum in Optics #Plant Reproductive Biology #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2311.04773
openalex publication_date 2023/11/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Nematic liquid-crystal devices are a powerful tool to structure light in different degrees of freedom, both in classical and quantum regimes. Most of these devices exploit either the possibility of introducing a position-dependent phase retardation with a homogeneous alignment of the optic axis -- e.g., liquid-crystal-based spatial light modulators -- or conversely, with a uniform but tunable retardation and patterned optic axis, e.g., q-plates. The pattern is the same in the latter case on the two alignment layers. Here, a more general case is considered, wherein the front and back alignment layers are patterned differently. This creates a non-symmetric device which can exhibit different behaviours depending on the direction of beam propagation and effective phase retardation. In particular, we fabricate multi-q-plates by setting different topological charges on the two alignment layers. The devices have been characterized by spatially resolved Stokes polarimetry, with and without applied electric voltage, demonstrating new functionalities.