Change of Focus for Liquid Crystals

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Sunday May 21, 2006 @08:09AM from the scientists-all-charged-up-about-new-discovery dept.

Dylan Knight Rogers writes to tell us PhysicsWeb is reporting that US physicists have discovered a new liquid-crystal lens design that can alter the focus by varying the voltage applied. From the article: "The new lens, which has been built by Shin-Tson Wu and colleagues at the University of Central Florida, allows the focus to be changed in a new way. The device consists of a mixture of liquid-crystal molecules and smaller N-vinylpyrrollidone monomers placed between two glass substrates, each of which is coated with a thin transparent layer of conducting indium tin oxide. They then placed a concave glass lens with a flat base on top of one of the substrates."

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Re:Battery life... by sco08y · 2006-05-21 09:57 · Score: 5, Informative

A camera that could Auto-focus without any moving, mechanical parts

I'm not sure if that would work.

From TFA:

The only snag with the new device is its long focusing time of about three minutes. This is because the lens is relatively large (9 mm), which means that molecular diffusion across it is slow. However, this should not be problem in micro-sized lenses in which the estimated response time is around 1 second at room temperature.

I assume they're talking about lens diameter. It might work for smaller cellphone type cameras, though.