The directed self-assembly of reflective liquid crystalline polymer films to form polarization-independent diffractive optical elements

The directed self-assembly of liquid crystal polymers enables significantly enhanced optical properties compared to conventional isotropic optical materials. The transmissive properties of these thin polymeric films have been extensively studied, but the exploration of reflective liquid crystalline polymeric materials films has received little attention due to challenges in producing large, high-quality self-assembled films. We explore here for the first time stacked polymer cholesteric liquid crystal thin films as a pathway to generate reflective diffractive optics that act on both hands of circularly polarized light independently. We present 3 unique exemplar cases with increasing design complexity to communicate the widespread potential of these unique thin polymer films. [Display omitted] •Directed self-assembly of liquid crystal polymers enables new optical physics.•Reflective geo-phase polymers require two types of directed self-assembly.•Stacked polymeric cholesteric films can generate reflective diffractive optics.•Three unique exemplar cases with increasing design complexity are presented.