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We developed a waveguide liquid crystal display from a liquid crystal (LC)/polymer composite. It does not need polarizers or color filters. It is illuminated by color LEDs installed on its edge. The light produced by the edge LEDs is coupled into the display and then waveguided through the display. When the LC is in the transparent state, the incident light is waveguided through and no light comes out of the viewing side of the display. When the LC is in the scattering state, the incident light is scattered and comes out of the display. It can be used either for transparent display or for direct view display. The composite has a submillisecond response time, and a field sequential scheme can be used to display full color images. Because the display does not need polarizers or color filters, its energy efficiency is much higher than current liquid crystal displays.

We demonstrated that polymer stabilization can significantly improve the response time of in‐plane‐switching liquid crystal display. We carried out a systematic study of the effect of polymer networks on the performance of in‐plane‐switching liquid crystal display. The polymer network has a strong aligning effect on the liquid crystal and has the advantage of reducing the switching time of the display but may have the disadvantage of ruining the contrast ratio because of its scattering effect. Through optimization, we successfully improve the switching time (less than 6 ms) and reduce the scattering and thus retain high contrast ratio (higher than 1000:1).

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We report a light waveguide liquid crystal display (LCD) based on the flexoelectric effect. The display consists of two parallel flat substrates with a layer of flexoelectric liquid crystal sandwiched between them. A light-emitting diode (LED) is installed on the edge of the display and the produced light is coupled into the display. When no voltage is applied, the liquid crystal is uniformly aligned and is transparent. The incident light propagates through the display by total internal reflection at the interface between the substrate and air, and no light comes out of the viewing side of the display. The display appears transparent. When a voltage is applied, the liquid crystal is switched to a micrometer-sized polydomain state due to flexoelectric interaction and becomes scattering. The incident light is deflected from the waveguide mode and comes out of the viewing side of the display. We achieved thin-film-transistor active matrix compatible driving voltage by doping liquid crystal dimers with large flexoelectric coefficients. The light waveguide LCD does not use polarizers as in conventional LCDs. It has an ultrahigh transmittance near 90% in the voltage-off state. It is very suitable for transparent display, which can be used for head-up display and augmented reality display.