STTR Phase I: Novel Manufacturing Approach for Adaptive Transmissive Tunable Optical Band-Pass Filter with Controllable Bandwidth

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I research project proposes a novel liquid crystal manufacture approach for an Adaptive Transmissive Tunable Optical Band-Pass Filter with Controllable Bandwidth. It dynamically passes a variable narrow band spectral component from the visible to the infrared (IR). The filter's performance characteristics, particularly the variable bandwidth, are not attainable with current commercial products and state-of-the-art technologies. This filter is a vital enabling component for many photonics instruments such as multi- and hyper-spectral imaging system, mine detector, and optical beam steering for tracking, ranging and measuring for free-space optical communication.The success of the program will lead to novel manufacture approach(s) for tunable band-pass filters. It will provide revolutionary liquid crystal filter manufacturing approaches to fabricating tunable band-pass filters with variable bandwidth with high figure-of-merit liquid crystals with high efficiency, low loss, fast tuning speed, and low tuning voltage. The tunable filter itself will lead to powerful new instruments.