Fast switching of vertically aligned negative liquid crystals by optically hidden relaxation

Abstract

We propose a method for fast switching of vertically aligned (VA) negative liquid crystals (LCs) by hiding the relaxation process of LCs. During the turn-off process, a strong in-plane electric field is applied for a short duration of time instead of relying solely on the slow relaxation of LCs. The LC molecules are rotated to the transmission axis of one of the polarisers by the applied in-plane electric field, resulting in turn-off switching that is 5.8 times faster than that of a conventional VA cell. By applying an overdriving scheme, we experimentally obtained a total response time of 3.3 ms.

Keywords:

• fast switching
• optically hidden relaxation
• negative liquid crystals
• vertical alignment

Funding

This work was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (MSIP) [2011–0029198].