Rigorous Analysis of Electric-field-driven Liquid Crystal Lens for the 3D Display

초록

A rigorous simulation has been carried out to obtain the optical functionalities of an electric field driven liquid crystal (ELC) lens for switching between 2D and 3D displays. First, we calculated the polarization state of the light passing through an ELC lens by using the director distribution of liquid crystals and the extended Jones matrix method, and then calculated the overall phase retardation for the transmitted light from it. The phase retardation was used to obtain the optical path difference of the lens, which is required for ray tracing. The ELC lens used for the simulation was designed to have an optical path difference as close as possible to that of an ideal parabolic lens. The director distribution under the influence of an applied electric field was obtained by numerically analyzing the Erickson-Leslie equation with the use of the finite differential method. The simulation was carried out for a 9 view 3D LCD at 17.1 wide, where a lenticular lens was slanted to achieve natural stereoscopic images [1]. The results show that each view exists separately according to the viewing position at an optimum viewing distance of 80 . It is noted that the crosstalk ratio calculated by the present method is 1.88 , more than twice that by the conventional one of 0.74 [2]. This discrepancy might be attributed to the distortion of liquid crystals. The distortion of liquid crystals is ignored in the conventional method while it is precisely described in the present method, leading to an increase in the calculated noise level. It is expected that the present simulation method provides optimum design conditions for obtaining natural 3D images by rigorously analyzing the optical functionalities of an ELC lens.