Drop-on-demand printed negative dielectric anisotropy liquid crystal droplets for adaptive complex beam manipulation and assessment

TL;DR

This paper introduces an inkjet-printed liquid crystal droplet platform that enables adaptive complex beam generation and full vectorial optical field sensing within a single, scalable architecture, advancing optical manipulation and measurement.

Contribution

It presents a novel, integrated liquid crystal droplet system for adaptive beam control and optical field sensing, combining multiple functionalities in a printed soft-matter photonic platform.

Findings

Voltage-driven director reconfiguration produces tunable birefringence.

The system can generate skyrmionic-like optical fields.

It enables spectral and polarization retrieval and phase reconstruction.

Abstract

Adaptive manipulation of vectorial optical fields are important for optical metrology, imaging, and structured light related applications, yet existing approaches often rely on bulky or sequentially operated systems. Here we demonstrate an inkjet-printed negative dielectric anisotropy nematic liquid crystal droplet platform that unifies adaptive complex beam generation and full vectorial optical field sensing within a single printed architecture. For complex beam generation, voltage-driven director reconfiguration in the droplets produces tunable birefringence and wavelength-dependent polarization textures, including skyrmionic like optical fields. For adaptive full vectorial optical field sensing, the same droplet array enables spectral and polarization retrieval through wavelength-dependent intensity patterns and division-of-wavefront polarimetry, while also functioning as a microlens array for Shack Hartmann wavefront sensing to reconstruct phase. These results establish negative dielectric anisotropy liquid crystal droplets as a scalable soft-matter photonic system for adaptive beam manipulation and multidimensional optical field characterization.