An Opto‐Iontronic Cholesteric Liquid Crystalline Retina for Multimodal Circularly Polarized Neuromorphic Vision

Abstract

Abstract Circularly polarized light (CPL) is fundamental to phase‐controlled imaging, quantum optics, and optical computing. Conventional CPL detection, relying on polarizers and quarter‐wave plates, complicates device design and reduces sensitivity. Among emerging CPL detectors, organic field‐effect transistors (OFET) with helical organic semiconductors are highly promising due to their compact structures but suffer tedious synthesis, low dissymmetric factors ( g ph < 0.1), and high operating voltages (> 50 V). To address these issues, an opto‐iontronic cholesteric liquid crystalline ( i ‐CLC) film is developed that is both electrically and photonically active, serving as the dielectric in phototransistors. The well‐defined cholesteric structure and broadly tunable pitches of the i ‐CLC film enable it to detect CPL with an excellent “handedness” selectivity across a broad spectrum. Moreover, its ionic nature provides a high capacitance (up to 580 nF cm − 2 @20 Hz). The resulting flexible CPL detectors achieve an unprecedentedly high dissymmetry factor ( g ph = 1.33) at low operating voltages (< 5 V), showcasing significant potential in optical communication and data encryption. Furthermore, leveraging high g ph , they can perform in‐sensor computing for highly accurate semantic segmentation using fused multimodal visual inputs (e.g., circularly polarized and ordinary light), achieving an accuracy of 75.73% and a mean intersection over the union of 0.3982, surpassing the performance of non‐CPL photodetectors. Additionally, it optimizes power consumption by a factor of 10 2 compared to most conventional visual processing systems, offering a groundbreaking hardware solution for high‐performance neuromorphic CPL vision.