Vg. Dominic et al., MEASUREMENT AND MODELING OF THE ANGULAR-DISPERSION IN LIQUID-CRYSTAL BROAD-BAND BEAM-STEERING DEVICES, Optical engineering, 35(12), 1996, pp. 3371-3379
Liquid crystal beam steering devices behave like blazed diffraction gr
atings: the design wavelength can be nicely diffracted into a single o
rder. Unfortunately, the grating nature of these devices causes strong
angular dispersion of the transmitted light when the incident beam co
ntains a broad spectrum of wavelengths. We characterized the behavior
of a liquid crystal beam steerer for broadband illumination. We report
experimental measurements of the impulse response of the beam steerin
g device as a function of illumination wavelength. We also compare our
results to a theoretical analysis utilizing the beam-propagation meth
od (BPM). We find that even a simple model of the phase profile gives
good agreement with the experimental measurements. (C) 1996 Society of
Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.