INVITED: Semiconductor thin films enable accommodative vision and adaptive imaging

The loss of accommodative vision is one of the most frequently met human diseases. Combined with the cataract surgery, this problem (the loss of distance accommodation) may be partially resolved by using several passive intra ocular solutions. However, those solutions are not considered as reliable in long term since they rely on the force of the ciliary muscle that may decrease with time. 

We have developed an alternative “active accommodation” approach by using an electrically variable liquid crystal lens. Among the large variety of geometries, allowing the fabrication of liquid crystal lenses, we have chosen a new gradient index lens approach that has several key advantages. The first one is the absence of micro structuration in the clear aperture of the lens in contrast to Fresnel type liquid crystal lenses. This eliminates the night vision hallo that is present in multi focal or other micro structured intra ocular lenses. Another advantage of our approach is the extremely low power consumption of the lens that can be well below 10 microwatts /5/. Optical aberrations of our lens are also very low (figure 1) and they can be remotely adjusted with aging (post-surgery) by re-setting the default control parameters of the lens.