We studied the effects of polymer chain ordering in the alignment layer and resulting molecular interactions on the surface anchoring energy by introducing a reactive mesogen (RM) coating to the alignment layer. Directionally polymerized RMs on the rubbed alignment layer decrease the steric repulsion and increase the electronic interaction with liquid crystal molecules, and, as a result, the surface anchoring energy is enhanced in both the out-of plane and in-plane directions. We also demonstrated that this enhanced surface anchoring energy can be used to improve the response time characteristics of liquid crystal displays. V

We propose a polarizer-free liquid crystal display (LCD) with an electrically switchable microlens array. The incident lights are controlled to focused or defocused states by index matching of the lens polymer and LC layer. By adopting two light-blocking masks that have a circular stop pattern and the complementary open pattern, the LCD was able to realize the entire gray scale. Additionally, to achieve fast response time characteristics, we introduce polymerized RMs within the alignment layers.

We propose a single mode transflective liquid crystal display (LCD) which is operated as the transmissive and reflective modes in a single pixel without dividing into sub-pixels. The single pixel transflective LCD was composed of the cross-polarized nematic LCD as a light modulator and the broadband cholesteric liquid crystal film (BCLCF) as a half mirror. The BCLCF, simply prepared by the exposure of ultraviolet light to the mixture of the nematic LC and the reactive mesogen with chirality, selectively reflects a certain circular polarization but transmits the orthogonal circular polarization in entire visible light. The electro-optical properties in both transmissive and reflective modes coincide with each other.