Anisotropic films for optical applications based on liquid crystal and nanorods

In a push to reduce global energy consumption, it is necessary to reduce the energy needed for optical devices. In addition, there are other important issues for optical devices such as fabrication cost and miniaturization. With this point of view, in this PhD work various optical devices based on liquid crystal (LC) and nanorods (NR) are investigated and fabricated. Firstly, fabrication of thin film polarizers and color filters based on photo-polymerization of reactive LC is demonstrated. The thin film polarizer is fabricated for applications which require very small thicknesses of the final device such as electro-active contact lenses. These films are suitable to be processed in optical device manufacturing as additional films or as in-cell optical components. The third fabricated device is a widely tunable optical filter with microsecond switching time. A microsecond-range optical shutter for unpolarized light is demonstrated as a forth application using reactive LCs. On the other hand, I demonstrate full alignment of colloidal NRs in suspension by an electric field. Finally, I present four methods for the homogeneous deposition and alignment of NRs from a colloidal suspension. They may be applied in polarized emitters in OLED, polarized fluorescent sheets or polarization-selective detectors