| I have been working at the laser lab for over 3.5 years. I was initially hired to help out with a reflective cholesteric liquid crystal display technology that requires no back light (hence the term reflective) under a brilliant PhD student named Tonya Kosk. You can read more about it in "Technology Research News", and this article and this article on the LLE web page. I still will ocasionally help out on that project (now under control of Anka Trajkovska), but my main project is developing a Liquid Crystal Point Diffraction Interferometer (LCPDI) from our NASA funding. I am listed as second author on an SPIE journal publication so far, and if time permits, I have a possibility for maybe two more conference papers. My work there has focused on aligning planar nematic LCs, optimizing the optical set up to maximize fringe interference contrast, full MATLAB simulation of the optical set up to see the effects of changing different parameters, figuring out what caused the "ghost fringes" and cyclical contrast fluctuations in our devices and using MATLAB to model their possible magnitudes, and most recently developing a simple way to measure the responce time and developing a GUI controled circuit to drive the cells and take said measurements (in progress). |
