Wide temperature-range, multi-component, optically isotropic antiferroelectric bent-core liquid crystal mixtures for display applications

ABSTRACT

We present studies on 21 multi-component mixtures consisting of bent-core liquid crystals to obtain room temperature switching between optically isotropic and birefringent states. Four of the mixtures show a significant enhancement over our previous results that were obtained either only at elevated temperatures, or did not show switching at room temperatures with appreciable contrast or speed. Although the switching of the new mixtures still requires high fields and shows only speeds at ~100 ms, the results appear already useful for specific applications, such as transparent displays, that do not require video-rate switching and fast refresh rates of the content.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Antiferroelectric
• mixtures
• display
• optically isotropic

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the financial support and further insights into the project by LG Display and from National Science Foundation (DMR 1506018). T.H. acknowledges the support of the Ohio Third Frontier (OTF) Program for Ohio Research Scholars ‘Research Cluster on Surfaces in Advanced Materials’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplementary material can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge the financial support and further insights into the project by LG Display and from National Science Foundation (DMR 1506018).