One-Step Fabrication of Graded Rainbow-Colored Holographic Photopolymer Reflection Gratings

摘要

Holographic polymer dispersed liquid crystal (H-PDLC) materials belong to a phase separation materials system where the liquid crystals (LC) can form droplets, of controllable sizes, that are phase separated from the polymer-rich regions during the photopolymerization process.Significant research in this material system has focused on the development of holographic optical elements that are low-cost, lightweight and high performance. The LCs provide electric-field sensitive optical elements that enable the fabrication of switchable transmissive and reflective diffraction optics.These structures are created by the coherent interference of laser radiation within a syrup containing a photoreactive monomer, a photoinitiator, a co-initiator and the LC. It is believed that novel and promising bio-medical applications are also achievable based on these hybrid LC and polymer materials and devices.In recent years, we successfully demonstrated a variation of the standard H-PDLC system to fabricate highly reflective volume Bragg gratings'4' and nanoporous polymer photonic crystals. Novel applications of these materials have included nano- and meso-particle organizers'61 and organic solvent vapor sensors.More recently, Finlayson et al.