Shuaijia Huang

Transmissive and Transflective Blue-Phase LCDs With Double-Layer IPS Electrodes

A double-layer in-plane-switching electrode design is proposed for transmissive and transflective blue-phase liquid crystal displays. The new design significantly reduces the operating voltage in transmissive display by 60%; in transflective displays where the bottom-layer electrodes are made of conductive reflectors, it increases transmittance to 98%, achieves single gamma driving and enhances sunlight readability.

Polymer network liquid crystal grating/Fresnel lens fabricated by holography

ABSTRACT In this article, polymer network liquid crystal (PNLC) grating/Fresnel lens is fabricated by holography. The exposure light pattern for the grating is obtained by interfering two planar wave fronts, while the Fresnel pattern is achieved by interfering a planar wave front and a spherical wave front. Owing to the alignment effect and anchoring power of polymer network, the holographic PNLC grating achieves improved diffraction efficiency, and remarkably reduced operation voltage (reduced by 80%) compared with holographic polymer-dispersed-liquid-crystal and holographic polymer-stabilised blue-phase liquid-crystal gratings, while maintaining submillisecond response. Moreover, it achieves high spatial frequency with a 2-μm grating period, thanks to the holographic fabrication. The holographic PNLC Fresnel lens also exhibits attractive electro-optical properties. Graphical Abstract

Diffractive devices based on blue phase liquid crystals

Blue phase liquid crystal (BPLC) has been attractive for display and photonic applications for its sub-millisecond response time, no need for surface alignment, and an optically isotropic dark state. Because of these advantages, diffractive devices based on blue phase liquid crystals have great potential for wide applications. In this work, we present several BPLC diffractive devices. The operation principles, fabrication and experimental measurements will be discussed in details for two BPLC gratings realized by holographic method and a BPLC Fresnel lens using a spatial light modulator projector. All of these devices exhibit several attractive features such as sub-millisecond response, relatively high spatial resolution and polarization-independence.