Patent ID: 7176992

Claim:
A method of fabricating a diffractive or non-dispersive polymer dispersed liquid crystal electrooptic device, comprising the steps of: providing a non-chiral nematic liquid crystal in the form of a eutectic mixture, wherein said nematic liquid crystal has a positive dielectric anisotropy; providing a photo-curable pre-polymer mixture; mixing said nematic liquid crystal with said photo-curable pre-polymer mixture to form a homogeneous nematic/pre-polymer mixture, with said nematic liquid crystal being greater than 40% (by weight) of said combined homogeneous mixture; providing a cell comprising a pair of spaced apart transparent substrates that are each coated with a transparent conductive layer, without the inclusion of an alignment layer for aligning said nematic liquid crystal; filling said cell with said homogeneous nematic/pre-polymer mixture; and photo-curing said nematic/pre-polymer mixture using a spatially inhomogeneous illumination source; deriving said spatially inhomogeneous illumination source used to photo-cure the nematic/pre-polymer mixture from the interference of two coherent optical beams within said cell; and utilizing the above fabrication method to create said diffractive or non-dispersive electrooptic device in the form of a polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) exhibiting low scattering loss and high index modulation.