Thermal responsive microlens arrays fabricated by smectic liquid crystal defects

Abstract

Adjustable microlens has been attractive and investigated due to the tunability of optical properties for various applications such as tunable photonic waveguides, electronic displays and miniature optical sensing. However, multistep processes or treatments are needed for the fabrication. Here, we demonstrated a simple and efficient method for fabrication of thermal responsive microlens array (MLAs) using self-assembled smectic LC defects (TFCDs). Unlike previous researches for fabricating tunable microlens using liquid crystal, this method is used solely liquid crystalline materials without mixing other materials or applying external field. This method can be allowed to easily control focal length and number of arrays of microlens.