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.

Control of the polarized light generated from a luminophore has been intensively studied in organic light emitting diodes due to an enhancement of light intensity. The direct emission of highly circularly polarized light has been reported in a twist stacking of an achiral conjugated polymer by boundary surface effect without any chiral dopant. Although the twisted configuration of the emitting layer was obtained by applying different boundary conditions to two interfaces of the conjugated polymer, little study has been performed on the effect of the interfaces of the mesogenic polymer so far. Here, twist‐angle‐varying configuration in a single luminophore is designed and demonstrated to investigate an interfacial effect such as surface anchoring phenomena of conjugated mesogenic polymer. The continuously varying twisted configuration is fabricated by applying the circularly and unidirectionally rubbing method to the lower and the upper interfaces of the mesogenic luminophore, respectively. The surface anchoring and bulk elastic properties of luminophores are systematically analyzed to investigate twist deformation. Furthermore, a self‐luminous light source generating continuously varying polarization of light is demonstrated. The proposed light source can generate multi‐polarization states including linearly polarized, right‐handed circularly polarized, and left‐handed circularly polarized light in a single substrate.

Reactive mesogens (RMs) can enhance the azimuthal anchoring energy of planar alignment layers used in liquid crystal (LC) devices; herein, we studied the interactions between the RMs and the planar alignment material that determine whether this enhancement can occur. Two alignmentlayer materials were studied: polyamic acid (PA) and polyimide (PI). The addition of RMs to the PI-type alignment layer was effective in enhancing the azimuthal anchoring energy, whereas the addition of RMs to the PA-type alignment layer had little effect. Surface analysis revealed that the RMs adhered well to the PI-type alignment surface only; in the resulting cell, the presence of the RMs enhanced both the rise and decay times in fringe field switching (FFS)-mode operation.