Ferroelectric thin films with liquid crystal for gradient index applications

We report on the first ever combination of a thin film of lead zirconate titanate (PZT) with a liquid crystal (LC) layer. Many liquid crystal applications use a transparent conductive oxide to switch the liquid crystal. Our proposed processing does not, instead relying on the extremely high dielectric constant of the ferroelectric layer to extend the electric field from widely spaced electrodes over the liquid crystal. It eliminates almost entirely the fringe field problems that arise in nearly all the liquid crystal devices that use multiple addressing electrodes. We show, both via rigorous simulations as well as experiments, that the addition of a PZT layer over the addressing electrodes leads to a markedly improved LC switching performance at distances of up to 30 μm from the addressing electrodes with the current PZT-layer thickness of 0.84 μm. This improvement in switching is used to tune the focal length of the microlens with electrodes spaced at 30 μm.