Abstract
Although the commercialization technology of liquid crystal displays is very mature nowadays, the issues of poor optical efficiency is still remaining to be improved. In the recent decade, taking the advantage of rapid and mature development of the ultra precision tooling technology and lithography technology micro and nano structure optical components revealing design flexibility, multi-functionality, and high integration have attracted abundant attention in different research fields of optical systems. Knowledge of geometric optics, diffraction optics, and rigorous couple wave theory is applied to investigate the optical properties of the micro and nano structure optical elements. In this thesis, these valuable properties of micro and nano structure components were studied and applied to improve the optical performance of a laser projection system and to develop a polarized backlight for enhancing optical efficiency of LCD displays. In the proposed laser projection system, a double-side microlens array beam shaper was developed to shape the profiles of laser light sources and attached to a vibration module as a speckle reduction unit. The performance of speckle suppression was evaluated and factors influencing speckle measurement were studied. In Chapter 4, a new polarized backlight structure consisting of a designated aperture-limited light guide plate and a dedicated lenticular lens array was proposed and prototyped to demonstrate enhancement of the extraction efficiency of polarized light through a wire grid polarizer. Furthermore, the central brightness is increased simultaneously.