Irradiation study of liquid crystal variable retarder for Full-disk Magneto-Graph payload onboard ASO-S mission

The Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory(ASO-S)is a mission proposed by the Chinese Solar Physics Community.As one of the three payloads of ASO-S,the Full-disc Magneto-Graph(FMG)will measure the photospheric magnetic fields of the entire solar disk with high spatial and temporal resolution,and high magnetic sensitivity,where liquid crystal variable retarder(LCVR)is the key to whether FMG can achieve its scientific goal.So far,there is no space flight experience for LCVR.Therefore,irradiation study for LCVRs becomes more important and urgent in order to make sure their safety and reliability in space application.In this paper,γirradiation,proton irradiation,and ultra-violet(UV)irradiation are tested for LCVRs respectively.The optical and chemical properties during irradiation tests are measured and analyzed.For optical properties,there is no significant change in those parameters FMG payload concerned except the retardation.Although there is no drastic degradation in the retardation versus voltage during irradiations,the amount of retardation variation is much higher than the instrument requirements.Thus,an in-flight retardation versus voltage should be added in FMG payload,reducing or even avoiding the impact of retardation change.For chemical properties,the clearing point and birefringence of the LC materials almost have no change;the ion density dose not change below 60 krad[Si],but begin to increase dramatically above 60 krad[Si].

Noise suppression for the detection laser of a nuclear magnetic resonance gyroscope based on a liquid crystal variable retarder

Nuclear magnetic resonance gyroscopes （NMRGs） are a kind of rotation-speed sensor that senses the angular velocity by measuring a frequency shift in the Larmor pre- cession of the nuclear spin in a constant magnetic field.

Interference effect on the liquid-crystal-based Stokes polarimeter

The Stokes polarimeter based on liquid crystal variable retarders(LCVRs)is envisaged as a promising novel technique for polarization measurement in space applications due to the inherent advantage of eliminating the need for conventional rotating polarizing optics and increasing the measuring speed.However,the intrinsic multi-beam interference in LCVRs limits its polarization accuracy by several percent.How to eliminate the influence of the interference effect becomes an urgent issue for the liquid-crystal-based Stokes polarimeter.The present study introduces a simplified but effective interference model based on the thin-film optics and polarized light theory to simulate the relationship between the interference effect of the LCVRs-based Stokes polarimeter and the polarization accuracy.The simulation results show that the transmittance variation of LCVR with the derived voltage is caused by multi beam interference between the indium tin oxide(ITO)film and the liquid crystal within LCVR,which produces a few percent of instrumental polarization.The instrumental polarization is about 0.01 and different for different wavelengths.An optimization method was proposed to reduce the instrumental polarization to 0.002,effectively improving the polarization sensitivity of the Stokes polarimeter limited by the interference.In addition,an experimental setup was built up to measure and analyze the influence of the interference effect of the LCVRs-based Stokes polarimeter on the polarization accuracy before and after the optimization.The experiment results are in good agreement with the simulation.

Study on phase retardation characteristic of LCVR using dispersion analysis and SVM

To calibrate the phase retardance of a Liquid crystal variable retarder(LCVR),its birefringence dispersion characteristic was analyzed,and the Support vector machines(SVM) algorithm was adopted to establish the prediction model.The obtained SVM decision function was used as a part of LCVR phase retardance,which was generated by the driving voltage.The experimental verification was carried out with a 568 nm laser.The results show that the deviation of the experimental value and the theoretical value is about 0.0061λ.SVM method could be used as an effective method for LCVR phase retardance characteristic calibration.