title: Fork gratings based on ferroelectric liquid crystals.
abstract: In this article, we disclose a fork grating (FG) based on the photo-aligned ferroelectric liquid crystal (FLC). The Digital Micro-mirror Device based system is used as a dynamic photomask to generated different holograms. Because of controlled anchoring energy, the photo alignment process offers optimal conditions for the multi-domain FLC alignment. Two different electro-optical modes namely DIFF/TRANS and DIFF/OFF switchable modes have been proposed where the diffraction can be switched either to no diffraction or to a completely black state, respectively. The FLC FG shows high diffraction efficiency and fast response time of 50µs that is relatively faster than existing technologies. Thus, the FLC FG may pave a good foundation toward optical vertices generation and manipulation that could find applications in a variety of devices.
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Ma
authors.forename: B Y
authors.initials: BY
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.forename: L Y
authors.initials: LY
authors.lastname: Shi
authors.forename: A K
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Srivastava
authors.forename: V G
authors.initials: VG
authors.lastname: Chigrinov
authors.forename: H-S
authors.initials: HS
authors.lastname: Kwok
authors.forename: W
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.forename: Y Q
authors.initials: YQ
authors.lastname: Lu