Theory and characteristics of holographic polymer dispersed liquid crystal transmission grating with scaffolding morphology.

We have performed a detailed characterization of the optical properties of a holographic polymer dispersed liquid crystal (LC) transmission grating with polymer scaffolding morphology, which was fabricated with conventional high-functionality acrylate monomer under low curing intensity. Temporal evolution of the grating formation was investigated, and the amount of phase-separated LC was determined by birefringence investigation. A grating model combined with anisotropic coupled-wave theory yielded good agreement with experimental data without any fitting parameter. The results in this study demonstrate the non droplet scaffolding morphology grating is characterized by a high degree of phase separation (70%), high anisotropy, low scattering loss (<6%), and high diffraction efficiency (95%).