Blue Phase Liquid Crystals & Their Potential for Astronomy

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• Oana Niculescu (University of Cambridge)
• Tuesday 14 May 2024, 11:15-12:00
• Coffee area, Battcock Centre.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Charles Walker.

Adaptive optics is a technique used to reduce the effects of aberration on wavefront propagation, used to correct for the light distortion which appears due to atmospheric turbulence. Customarily, in astronomy, systems employed for this purpose use deformable or adaptive mirrors as correctors, which are costly and mechanically actuated.

As opposed to a classic deformable mirror, which requires actuators to change its shape, a Liquid Crystal Wavefront Corrector (LCWFC) uses its inherent birefringence to act as a phase modulator and correct the incoming wavefront. Despite its reduced size and cost, LCWF Cs have historically suffered from a large response time, which makes them less desirable over typical solutions.

Blue Phases will be introduced as an alternative correcting medium. They have the potential to overcome the usual limitations of liquid crystal devices. Their working principle and typical design considerations will be presented, as well as progress made in making these devices a reality.

This talk is part of the Hills Coffee Talks series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Cavendish Laboratory Seminars
• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cambridge Astronomy Talks
• Cavendish Astrophysics Seminars
• Centre for Health Leadership and Enterprise
• Coffee area, Battcock Centre
• Combined External Astrophysics Talks DAMTP
• Cosmology, Astrophysics and General Relativity
• Featured lists
• Hills Coffee Talks
• ME Seminar
• Neurons, Fake News, DNA and your iPhone: The Mathematics of Information
• School of Physical Sciences
• Thin Film Magnetic Talks

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