High density data recording on thermally addressable liquid crystal for three-dimensional holographic display

A high density data recording technique is investigated using a thermally addressable smectic A liquid crystal panel in order to obtain three-dimensional (3D) images using the holographic technique. An overwrite technique has been developed to obtain a high resolution, The optimum peak power for an IR write laser beam is found to be 15mW with a pulse frequency of 10 kHz and a pulse duty of 60%. A horizontal spatial frequency of 333 line-pairs per mm (corresponding to a 1.5 mu s pixel pitch) is obtained with a diffraction efficiency of 1%. The diffraction efficiency becomes as high as 18% when the maximum spatial frequency is reduced to 62.5 lp/mm.