Improvement of alignment quality for FLC with mixing liquid crystal polymer

Abstract

Ferroelectric liquid crystal (FLC) with I-N*-C* phase sequence is most attractive due to its continuous grey level and fast response; however, the alignment problem of two-domains defect restricted its application. In this work, one kind of one terminal polymerizable nematic liquid crystal (NLC) mesogen was mixed to FLC to improve its alignment quality. Experimental results showed that mono-domain uniform alignment of FLC can be obtained with mixing NLC polymer. With optimized concentration, the FLC devices could offer half-V-shaped electric-optical characteristic of driving contrast of 182:1 and fast response of 300 μs even after polymerization. This work can provide one simple and effective method for fabricating stable I-N*-C* FLC devices.