Pre-compensating curved electrode design for aberration reduction in modal control liquid crystal lenses

The nonlinear electro-optic response of liquid crystal materials poses a fundamental constraint for the performance of liquid crystal lenses. This work proposes a curved-bottom-electrode design for modal control liquid crystal lenses (MC-LCLs) to define the spacing between the high-resistance layer and the bottom electrode, thereby enabling the lens to generate a pre-compensated electric field. Through the nonlinear electro-optic response of the LC field to this pre-compensated electric field, the MC-LCL with a pre-compensating curved electrode (PCCE-MC-LCL) achieves quasi-parabolic optical path difference (OPD) profiles across the lens. Simulation results demonstrate that within the optical power range of 1.15–2.91 m−1, the PCCE-MC-LCL with a 5 mm aperture achieves an average RMS OPD error of 0.1115 λ, representing a significant 69.64% reduction compared with the conventional MC-LCL (0.3673 λ). The simulations further confirm that the curved electrode mitigates the degraded imaging performance of conventional MC-LCLs at high optical power, which originates from both their inherent lack of local electric-field modulation and the nonlinear electro-optic response of the LC.