Cylindrical Liquid Crystal Lens and Its Applications in Optical Pattern Correlation Systems

Abstract
The optical characteristics of a cylindrical liquid crystal (LC) lens are investigated with voltages applied to LC cells. We show that the focusing performance of cylindrical LC lenses, such as focal length, can be varied by voltage application. With this kind of cylindrical LC lens, optical correlation architectures are achieved for the first time using a holographic matched spatial filter. The influence on correlation results of different reference light distributions from a LC lens under various applied voltages is also discussed.