Liquid Crystal Tunable Filter

Abstract

The objective was to manufacture and test a tunable birefringent filter made using liquid crystal variable phase plates. In FY 92, a six stage tunable birefringent filter was purchased from Meadowlark Optical, Inc. of Longmont, CO. The filter design is a variation on the well known Lynot-Solc birefringent filter design. The filter was tested using resources available in the Code 843 Receiver laboratory. Preliminary analysis indicates that the liquid crystal variable phase plates operated as expected and did not seem to degrade the filter performance appreciably. The filter stages were characterized individually and assembled into a composite filter. Testing measured the filter's performance and agreement with theory that included characterization of the bandpass, field of view, peak transmission, out-of-band rejection, and transmission uniformity. The filter performance is still being assessed, and the final report will be available as an NRaD technical report in 1994. In general, the measured filter performance agreed well with predicted performance, resulting in a filter that was tunable over the specified range with a bandwidth that varied from 1.5 to 3 nm. Lasers, Tunable optical filter, Nonlinear optics, Narrow-band filter, Optics.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 1994
Accession Number
ADA284383

Entities

People

  • G. L. Adams

Organizations

  • Naval Command, Control and Ocean Surveillance Center

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Advanced Electronics
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Bandwidth
  • Birds
  • Composite Materials
  • Crystals
  • Detectors
  • Lasers
  • Light Sources
  • Liquid Crystals
  • Materials
  • Nonlinear Optics
  • Optical Filters
  • Optics
  • Plastic Explosives
  • Spreadsheet Software
  • Standards
  • Three Dimensional
  • Waveplates

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Electronics Engineering
  • Image Processing and Computer Vision.
  • Optical Physics and Photonics.

Technology Areas

  • Directed Energy