EFFICIENT BEAM-STEERING IN THE 1.55 MICRON WINDOW USING LARGE-TILT FLC ONE-DIMENSIONAL ARRAY

The recent development of wavelength division multiplexing requires no vel transparent optical switches with moderate reconfiguration rates ( typically the ms) for management and safety requirements at the optica l -wavelength- level. One important fonction in such an optical switch is beam steering in the infrared 1.55 mu m region. For that purpose, we propose to design a ferroelectric liquid crystal spatial light modu lator (FLC SLM) acting as a programmable diffraction grating. Futhermo re, a large-tilt angle FLC is used to make the device insensitive to t he polarisation of the input wavefront. Prior to the realisation of th e optical swich, we present here an experimental characterisation of t he FLC beam deflector.