Change of Focus for Liquid Crystals

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."

Comments

Not for monitors just yet

[From A Far Away Land]

"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 take it that means that LCD monitors will not be using this technology any time soon?

The only snag.....

[Proudrooster]

FTA: The only snag with the new device is its long focusing time of about three minutes.

Not for monitors at all!

[Spock_NPA]

I know Slashdoters don't read the article before posting, but gosh darn it.. It was never implied in the article that this technology would be adapted for LCDs. Just because something involves "liquid crystal" doesn't automatically mean it's an LCD technology. What we have here is basically a very neat new way of creating an adjustable micro lens. Aside from lenses, "[t]he technique could also be used to make other adaptive microdevices such as prism arrays and phase gratings".