Reconfigurable droplets as tunable optical materials
Professor Lauren Zarzar, Pennsylvania State University
Dynamically tunable optical materials are important for numerous applications ranging from displays, imaging devices, wavefront-shapers, and energy harvesting devices to biomedical sensors and health diagnostic tools. Although not yet a staple in the optical engineer’s toolbox, liquids offer tremendous flexibility, design advantages, and manufacturing benefits in applications that require tunability, including liquid metal telescope mirrors, index-matching immersion fluids, dye-lasers, and variable focus lenses. Despite the promise of using liquids within optical devices, the same malleability and sensitivity to many stimuli that makes liquids so valuable for tunable optics can also make them difficult to control with the precision required for optical applications. I will discuss recent developments we have made in using reconfigurable complex emulsion droplets as tunable optical materials in which we can precisely manipulate the curvature and orientation of liquid-liquid interfaces. Such responsive and reconfigurable fluids have many potential applications and exciting properties which will be discussed, including tunable lenses, sensors, and generating structural coloration.