Continuous, wide field-of-view, high-efficiency, and fast-response beam steering devices are desirable in a plethora of applications. Liquid crystals (LCs)—soft, bi-refringent, and self-assembled materials which respond to various external stimuli—are especially promising for fulfilling these demands. In this paper, we review recent advances in LC beam steering devices. We first describe the general operation principles of LC beam steering techniques. Next, we delve into different kinds of beam steering devices, compare their pros and cons, and propose a new LC-cladding waveguide beam steerer using resistive electrodes and present our simulation results. Finally, two future development challenges are addressed: Fast response time for mid-wave infrared (MWIR) beam steering, and device hybridization for large-angle, high-efficiency, and continuous beam steering. To achieve fast response times for MWIR beam steering using a transmission-type optical phased array, we develop a low-loss polymer-network liquid crystal and characterize its electro-optical properties.

Liquid crystal-based reflective polarization volume grating (PVG), also known as a linear Bragg–Berry phase optical element or a member of volume Bragg gratings (VBGs), is a functional planar structure with patterned orientation of optical axis. Due to the strong polarization selectivity, nearly 100% diffraction efficiency, large diffraction angle, and simple fabrication process, PVGs have found potential applications in novel photonic devices and emerging near-eye displays. In this review paper, we describe the operation principles, discuss the optical properties, present the fabrication methods, and provide promising applications of PVGs for near-eye displays and novel photonic devices.

Micro-LED (light-emitting diode) is a potentially disruptive display technology, while power consumption is a critical issue for all display devices. In this paper, we develop a physical model to evaluate the power consumption of micro-LED displays under different ambient lighting conditions. Both power efficiency and ambient reflectance are investigated in two types of full color display structures: red/green/blue (RGB) micro-LEDs, and blue-LED pumped quantum dots color-conversion. For each type of display with uniform RGB chip size, our simulation results indicate that there exists an optimal LED chip size, which leads to 30–40% power saving. We then extend our model to analyze different RGB chip sizes, and find that with optimized chip sizes an additional 12% average power saving can be achieved over that with uniform chip size.

Recent advances in perovskite nanocrystals-enhanced solid-state lighting (SSL) and liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) are reviewed. We first discuss the development, optical properties, and stability issue of materials, and then we evaluate the performance of SSL and LCDs with perovskite downconverters adopted. In SSL performance evaluation, we investigate the fitting-curve effect in calculations and optimizations where simple Gaussian fitting and precise fitting are compared in detail, and we further optimize for highly efficient, good color-rendering, and human-healthy SSL sources. For LCD performance evaluation, we study the intrinsic tradeoffs between total light efficiency and color gamut coverage. Through optimizations using real line shapes, Rec. 2020 standard coverage as large as 92.8% can be achieved through hybrid integration. Finally, we briefly discuss two future challenges: materials development and device integration. We believe the emerging perovskite nanocrystals are highly promising for next-generation SSL and LCDs.

Color-converted micro-light-emitting diode (micro-LED) displays with wide color gamut, high ambient contrast ratio, and fast response time are emerging as a potentially disruptive technology. However, due to limited optical density and thickness of the color-conversion film, the blue light leakage and low color-conversion efficiency still hinder their widespread applications. In this paper, we demonstrate a patterned cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) polymer film with two special optical functionalities. On the green and red sub-pixels, the corresponding planar CLC texture acts as a distributed Bragg reflector for the blue light, which in turn improves the color conversion efficiency and expands the color gamut. On the blue sub-pixels, the corresponding focal-conic CLC texture acts as light scattering medium, which helps to reduce the angular color shift. Further analysis reveals that the patterned CLC film can alleviate the crosstalk between green and blue color filters. Therefore, compared to the display system without such a CLC film, our proposed device structure increases the color conversion efficiency by 143% (at ~90% Rec. 2020) and reduces average angular color shift Δu’v’ from 0.03 to 0.018 at the viewing angle with the most severe color shift. Such a patterned CLC film is applicable to all kinds of color-conversion display systems, including organic and inorganic phosphors.

Advances in materials, color rendering metrics and studies on biological effects promote the design for novel solid-state lighting sources that are highly energy efficient, excellent at color rendering and healthy for human circadian rhythms. Recently, perovskite nanocrystals have emerged as narrow-band, low-cost, color-tunable downconverters, elevating the design and development of solid-state lighting to a new level. Here, we perform a systematic optimization of using perovskite nanocrystals as downconverters to simultaneously optimize vision energy efficiency, color rendering quality and circadian action effect of lighting sources at both fixed and tunable color temperatures. Further analysis reveals the inherent differences in central wavelength and bandwidth preferences for different cases, providing a general guideline for designing circadian lighting. Through systematic optimization, highly efficient circadian lighting sources with excellent color rendering can be achieved.