Influence of a helical pitch on orthoconic antiferroelectric liquid crystals performance

Abstract

Orthoconic antiferroelectric liquid crystals, whose half cone angle is 45°, are of interest in display technology because they are capable of providing greyscale in passively addressing waveform while exhibiting very good contrast. However, orthoconic antiferroelectrics having short pitch are difficult to be aligned, this makes surface stabilized alignment unfeasible. In this case, dynamic behaviour is usually poor, avoiding electronic addressing with standard electronics. In this work, we report the helical pitch measurements of OAFLC mixtures and we compare electrooptical performance of high and low pitch OAFLCs.