An organic electrically switchable holographic material and its applications to display and photonics components are outlined. This material is an extension of polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) technology. Consisting of liquid crystal (LC), prepolymer and photoinitiator, a holographic PDLC (HPDLC) mixture can form LC droplets in the polymer matrix 1 - 2 orders of magnitude smaller than those in regular PDLCs. Thin HPDLC films sandwiched between transparent electrodes such as ITO-coated glass can be used to record high-resolution holographic gratings. These gratings, the result of the index modulation due to the phase separation of the LC from the polymer matrix, can be easily switched on and off under an electric voltage at a high speed 1 - 2 orders of magnitude faster than that of a regular PDLC device or a bulk nematic/cholesteric LC based device. Two types of switchable diffractive gratings, transmissive and reflective gratings, will be discussed. Applications such as wearable displays, portable projectors and optical networking components will be described in the presentation. Prototypes of some of these devices will be demonstrated in the presentation.
Plastic optical fiber (POF) has long been seen as a potential medium for implementing simple, very low cost optical links, but has not yet found significant application in data communication. In the near future, this situation is likely to change, as a new generation of POF with dramatically improved optical properties becomes commercially available. Unlike conventional POF, the new POF is based on amorphous perfluorinated polymers that are transparent in the near infrared. In order to develop useful fibers based on these new polymer materials, it has been necessary to better understand their fundamental optical properties, and to develop methods for manufacturing low-loss fiber. Since the available manufacturing methods typically result in graded-index POF's with very non-ideal index profiles, the possibility of severe bandwidth limitations has long been a concern. In addition, significant improvements in connection loss will be required to support high-speed systems. In this paper, we describe techniques that we and others have developed to eliminate or overcome these obstacles.
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