Silva Pirs

Influence of the polymer network on the switching behaviors in the polymer stabilized ferroelectric liquid crystals

The electric field induced stripe texture in the ferroelectric liquid crystals can be efficiently stabilized by means of the built-in low concentration polymer network, which tends to phase separate predominantly along the stripe texture domain walls, leaving the quasibookshelf alignment as well as the dynamics of the ferroelectric liquid crystals within each stripe to be very little affected by the polymer orienting surface, while efficiently stabilizing the stripe texture. Moreover the oriented polymer network within the domain walls reduces the elastic stress and helps increasing the ferroelectric liquid crystals molecular effective cone angle. This in turn results in the increase of the threshold voltage for the switching between the two bistable molecular orientations, further resulting in significant improvement of the contrast of the ferroelectric liquid crystals switching element in the case of the multiplex driving. The resulting polymer stabilized quasibookshelf alignment represents therefore a very promising solution for display applications.