Study of the purifying affects of thermal annealing for polymer‐wall liquid crystal cells

Abstract

The thermal annealing process was proposed to purify the pixel regions of a liquid crystal (LC) cell with polymer walls. This technique, based on thermal‐induced phase separation, successfully evicts the residual monomers from the LC volume and significantly improves electro‐optical properties of the polymer‐wall LC devices. The influence of the annealing process on the purity of LC‐rich domain and the electro‐optic properties of a LC cell was explored with a series of experiments. According to the experimental results, the annealing technique is extremely prospective for constructing flexible polymer‐wall LC display applications.

Keywords:

• polymer wall
• phase separation
• annealing
• phase retardation

Acknowledgement

We would like to acknowledge the funding of the research by the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC 96‐2622‐E‐239‐002‐CC3), and sincerely appreciate Mr M.‐S. Shie's technical assistance, such as taking SEM images and preparing the LC cell samples. Furthermore, we are particularly indebted to Giantplus Technology Co. Ltd for supplying essential equipment and assistance in this study.