The authors propose a method to control the viewing angle of a liquid crystal (LC) panel using dual-mode switching. To realize both wide viewing angle (WVA) characteristics and narrow viewing angle (NVA) characteristics with a single LC panel, the authors use two different dark states. The LC layer can be aligned homogeneously parallel to the transmission axis of the bottom polarizer for WVA dark state operation, while it can be aligned vertically for NVA dark state operation. The authors demonstrated that viewing angle control can be achieved with a single panel without any loss of contrast at the front.

We propose a fast two-step switching method of a homogeneous-aligned liquid crystal (LC) cell, where a trigger pulse is applied to align LCs vertically for a moment before they are in-plane switched to show a bright state. Because LCs aligned vertically by a trigger pulse are in a transient state rather than the stable state, the turn-on becomes faster. The turn-off also becomes faster because the pulse forcibly aligns the LC vertically to show the dark state. Experimental results show that significant acceleration of the grey-to-grey response as well as onoff switching can be achieved by the proposed switching method. #

This paper reports on the electro-optic characteristics of vertical alignment (VA) liquid crystal (LC) cells with liquid crystalline polymer networks. Optical bouncing, that occurs during the turn-on of VA cells, can be eliminated by introducing in-cell polymer networks. Furthermore, the turn-off also becomes much faster because of the anchoring effect caused by the anisotropy in the molecular shape of the liquid crystalline polymers. These response times have been found to vary for different LC/prepolymer mixtures. When the concentration of the liquid crystalline prepolymer in the initial LC/prepolymer mixture was 3, 5, or 10 wt %, the response times were measured to be 34, 56, and 87% faster than those of a VA cell with pure LC. These switching behaviors of VA cells with liquid crystalline polymer networks are demonstrated and compared with those using pure LC and with polymer networks made of isotropic prepolymers.

We show that a molecular combing process can be used to fabricate in parallel, in one step, a large number of co-planar carbon nanotube hybrid molecular transistors. The gate voltage is applied by the electrodes of a nanojunction thus increasing the miniaturisation of the device. We show with such devices that the bias coplanar grid is not very active on metal-like nanotubes and that the same conductance change can be obtained by deforming the tube by the tip of an atomic force microscope. On the contrary, the grid is very active on a semiconductor-like tube leading to transconductances of 160 nA/V.

We propose a method to control the pretilt angle of liquid crystals by employing a mixture of the vertical alignment polyimide and the liquid crystalline prepolymer (LCP). The pretilt angle between 10° and 90° can be controlled continuously by changing the mixing ratio of the LCP. Multidomains with different pretilt angles can be formed because the pretilt angle between 50° and 90° can be obtained by varying the UV exposure time region by region under a fixed mixing ratio. We confirmed experimentally that proposed alignment layers are thermally stable.