Switchable Mirror

Made from a special liquid crystal material, the switchable mirrors have an electrically variable transmittance or reflectance. By altering the liquid crystal material formulation, the mirrors can be fabricated to operate from the visible to midwave IR. Their reflection bandwidth can also be arbitrarily tailored to vary from a few nanometers to a few micrometers. The mirrors are a semi-solid state thin film device, and can be rapidly switched between the pure reflection, half-reflection and total transparent states through a push button. The mirrors offer customers a switchable reflective shutter for vast applications in photonics apparatus and instruments. Examples of the possible applications include variable apertures and zoon optics in imagers and displays.