We have investigated a new liquid crystal cell based on a nonchiral-doped optically compensated bend (OCB) mode. The average pretilt angle of this cell was higher than that of a conventional OCB cell; when undisturbed, the twist-to-splay energy barrier induced by topological differences remained in a twist state. We have called this twisted cell a twisted optically compensated bend (TOCB) cell. The TOCB cell does not require any warm-up time or warm-up voltage in electrical driving, and the response time of the TOCB cell was as fast as that of a conventional OCB cell. In this study, the TOCB cell was made using a polymer network pattern with high-pretilt-angle alignment, called a patterned-TOCB cell. The patterned-TOCB cell arose from the irradiation of UV light through a photomask and onto a pi cell, which was filled with nematic liquid crystal (NLC) and UV-curable polymer mixture upon a curing voltage being applied to it.
We propose a simple method for measuring the twist angle of a nematic liquid crystal cell, which is the combination of a transmission method and a reflection method. Our method is an improved “rotation polarizer method” that is not confined by the condition of the liquid crystal phase retardation of Δn
d/λ, where Δn is the refraction index anisotropy, d is the cell thickness and λ is the wavelength of light. The experiment is simulated by DIMOS software, which shows the high accuracy of the measurement method.
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