Kitae Kim is a PhD student in the Soft Matter and Device Research Group at Chungnam National University in Korea, supervised by Dr. Jun-Hee Na. His work uses Mightex’s Polygon Pattern Illuminator.

Pixelated Wrinkles Using Patterned Optical Phase Retardation(Mightex Research Award, 2021)

We used Mightex’s Polygon to form pixelated wrinkles on various surfaces. In addition, the continuous exposure technology of the Mightex Polygon has made it possible to locally expose the surface in conjunction with Nikon’s microscope software.

The optics based on a digital micromirror technology (Polygon) assembles wrinkle pixels of a notably small dimension over a large area at fast fabrication speed. Furthermore, these pixelated wrinkles can be formed on curved geometries.

Figure 1. Demonstration of pixelated wrinkles created using the Mightex Polygon.

The pixelated wrinkles can record images, which are naturally invisible, by mapping the gray level to the orientation of wrinkles. They can retrieve those images using the patterned optical phase retardation generated under the crossed polarizers. As a result, it is shown that the pixelated wrinkles enable new applications in optics such as image storage, informative labeling, and anti-counterfeiting.