Tunable electro-optic microlens array. II. Cylindrical geometry

Although the concept of an artificial compound eye has been discussed in th e literature, its optical arrangement has never been widely adopted for opt ical design. A design is presented for a tunable gradient-index microlens a rray, believed to be new, induced electro-optically inside a cylindrical sh ell. The transparent electrodes on the both sides of the shell are position ed such that the electrodes on the opposite side compensate the phase delay from the electrodes on the front side for a normally incident plane wave, thus suppressing the intrinsic electrode diffraction for the device without applied voltage. The original technique of the electric field calculation was developed to analyze the induced refractive index inside the shell for two types of electro-optic (EO) ceramics: with linear and with quadratic EO effects. For the linear effect it was shown that for given EO coefficients , electric held strength and intrinsic refractive index, the electrode numb er should exceed a certain amount to make the focal distance less than the cylinder radius. The quadratic effect provides higher sensitivity to the ty pe of the diffracted wave polarization. It was shown how the quadratic coef ficient ratio R-12/R-11 affects the focal-length difference between TE and TM light polarization. (C) 2000 Optical Society of America. OCIS codes: 120 .5710, 060.5060, 110.2760, 160.2100, 130.3120.