Polarization-selective diffractive optical elements with a twisted-nematic liquid-crystal display.

We propose a method for realizing a polarization-selective diffractive optical element by using of a single twisted-nematic liquid-crystal display (TN-LCD). We have demonstrated that two orthogonal polarization-encoding channels can be formed using a single TN-LCD operated in some special conditions. Based on the two orthogonal encoding channels, two orthogonal polarized components of a field with any complex amplitude can be holographically encoded and reconstructed and, hence, different output images with different polarization states could be obtained, or a vector beam with spatially inhomogeneous polarization distributions, as well as the desired complex amplitude distributions, could be combined.