Appeal No. 96-1368
Application 08/080,891
Answer indicates (at 1) that claims 7 and 8 are allowed and
(at 2) that several grounds of rejection applied to claims 1-
16 have been rendered moot by the abandonment of Appellants'
Application 08/074,179. Although the Answer states that the
appeal now involves claims 1-6 and 9-16, the only claims which
stand rejected in the Answer are claims 1-3, 5, 6, 11, 13, 14,
and 16, which are rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 for
obviousness over the prior art. We affirm. 3
The invention is a polarization-sensitive beam splitter
as defined in claim 1, which reads as follows:
1. A polarization-sensitive beam splitter comprising at
least one transparent wedge-shaped element of a birefringent
material, characterized in that the wedge-shaped element
comprises a polymerized uniaxially oriented liquid crystalline
monomer composition.
Appellants' Figures 6 and 7 show two embodiments of
Wollaston prisms using such wedge-shaped elements.
The references relied on by the examiner are:
Rogers et al. (Rogers) 4,525,413 Jun. 25, 1985
Takayanagi et al. 4,810,433 Mar. 7, 1989
(Takayanagi)
Inasmuch as the Answer does not include a rejection of3
dependent claims 4, 9, 10, 12, and 15, these claims are
presumably objected to for depending from rejected claims.
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