Abstract
This paper reports on the electro-optic characteristics of vertical alignment (VA) liquid crystal (LC) cells with liquid crystalline polymer networks. Optical bouncing, that occurs during the turn-on of VA cells, can be eliminated by introducing in-cell polymer networks. Furthermore, the turn-off also becomes much faster because of the anchoring effect caused by the anisotropy in the molecular shape of the liquid crystalline polymers. These response times have been found to vary for different LC/prepolymer mixtures. When the concentration of the liquid crystalline prepolymer in the initial LC/prepolymer mixture was 3, 5, or 10 wt %, the response times were measured to be 34, 56, and 87% faster than those of a VA cell with pure LC. These switching behaviors of VA cells with liquid crystalline polymer networks are demonstrated and compared with those using pure LC and with polymer networks made of isotropic prepolymers.