Stabilizing blue phase liquid crystals with linearly polarized UV light

Abstract

Polymer-stabilized blue-phase liquid crystal (PS-BPLC) has become an increasingly important technology trend for information display and photonic applications. BPLC exhibits several attractive features, such as reasonably wide temperature range, submillisecond gray-to-gray response time, no need for alignment layer, optically isotropic voltageoff state, and large cell gap tolerance when an in-plane switching (IPS) cell is employed. However, some bottlenecks such as high operation voltage, relatively low transmittance, and noticeable hysteresis and prolonged response time at high field region for IPS mode, still remain to be overcome before widespread application of BPLC can be realized. To reduce operation voltage, both new BPLC materials and new device structures have been investigated. In this paper, we demonstrate the stabilization a photopolymer-embedded blue phase liquid crystal precursor using a linearly polarized UV light for first time. When the UV polarization axis is perpendicular to the stripe electrodes of an IPS cell, anisotropic polymer networks are formed through the linear photo-polymerization process and the electrostriction effect is suppressed. As a result, the measured hysteresis is dramatically reduced from 6.95% to 0.36% and the response time shortened by ~2X compared to unpolarized UV exposure. To induce larger anisotropy in polymer networks for mitigating the electrostriction effect, high-intensity linearly polarized UV exposure is preferred. It is foreseeable this method will guide future BPLC device and material development as well as manufacturing process. The dawn of BPLCD is near.