Switchable liquid crystal grating with sub millisecond response

In present article, we disclose a fast switchable grating based on nematic liquid crystals. A fine striped electrode has been exploited to generate the grating profile and a driving scheme to drive the grating cell has also been proposed, which enable us to drive the cell up to very high frequency (∼2 kHz) with evident saturated optical states. The response time for the first order diffracted beam, at the electric field of 10 V/μm, is less than 100 μs and optical contrast is higher than 400:1. Thus, the proposed LC grating could find application in several advance electro-optical devices.