Study of electro-optical properties of liquid crystal/reactive mesogen-coated liquid crystal display fabricated by slit coater

Abstract

We have recently proposed a slit coater method for printable liquid crystal (LC) devices. In this method, the LC/reactive mesogen (RM) mixture was directly coated uniaxially onto the substrate surface by shear flow between the slit nozzle and the substrate, and the liquid crystalline molecules were anchored by in situ photopolymerisation of RM monomers. In this study, the dependence of electro-optical properties and device parameters of LC sample cells fabricated by the slit coater on ultraviolet (UV) exposure dosage was investigated. Moreover, effects of UV exposure dosage and thermal annealing on the azimuthal anchoring energy of LC sample cells fabricated by the slit coater are presented.

Keywords:

• slit coater
• reactive mesogen
• shear flow
• pretilt
• azimuthal anchoring

Acknowledgements

We sincerely thank Merck Limited, Japan, JNC petrochemical Co., Ltd., and DIC Corporation for providing us with LC, polyimide and the UV-curable LC.

Funding

This work was partly supported by an A-STEP project of Japan Science and Technology Agency [AS2314036B].