We have fabricated twisted nematic cells doped by carbon nanotubes ͑CNTs͒. The CNTs with a minute amount of doping did not perturb the liquid crystal orientation in the off and on state. The hysteresis studies of voltage-dependent transmittance and capacitance under ac and dc electric field showed that the residual dc, which is related to an image sticking problem in liquid crystal displays, was greatly reduced due to the ion trapping by CNTs.

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We report an effect of superelongation of carbon nanotube (CNT) aggregates driven by the electric field in a liquid crystal (LC) medium. The CNT aggregates started to elongate above a certain threshold field and sustained the elongation up to nearly 400% in the linear region with a large electroactive constant of 70 (V/microm)-1. The original morphology of the CNT aggregates was restored upon removal of the field. The elongation was fully reversible below a certain breakdown field, irrespective of the nematic or isotropic phase of the LC medium. The overall process involved (i) the alignment of CNT aggregates to increase the dipole energy of aggregates in the presence of the bias voltage, (ii) stretching of the CNTs by sliding-out from the bundles, and (iii) the entropic elasticity that restores the randomly entangled CNT network of the original aggregates after suppression of the bias voltage.