Liquid crystal based compound lenses work like insect eyes

The lenses produce sets of images with different focal lengths, a property that could be used for three-dimensional imaging.

Taking advantage of the geometry in which the liquid crystals like to arrange themselves, the engineers and physicists at the University of Pennsylvania were able to grow compound lenses with controllable sizes, as the video below demonstrates.

The compound eyes found in insects and some sea creatures use thousands of lenses to provide information without the need for a sophisticated brain. Human artifice can only begin to approximate these naturally self-assembled structures.

Francesca Serra and Mohamed Amine Gharbi, postdoctoral researchers in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences, led the study, which was published in Advanced Optical Materials.

Previous work had showed how smectic liquid crystal, a transparent, soap-like class of the material, naturally self-assembled into flower-like structures when placed around a central silica bead. Each ‘petal’ is a ‘focal conic domain’, a structure that can be used as a simple lens.