Surface-Polymer Stabilized Liquid Crystals

Abstract

We report the creation and study of an electrically controllable self-organized surface-polymer stabilized liquid crystal system. We use thin reactive mesogen films as alignment layers to build cells filled by a pure non-reactive nematic liquid crystal (LC). The application of external fields during the photo polymerization of the reactive mesogen layer allows us the control of scattering properties of obtained cells. We investigate the system's morphology and optical behaviour by using electro optical scattering and microscopy to show that the use of this approach enables very interesting performance compared to traditional “bulk” LC-based composite light shutters.

Keywords:

• Keywords Amplitude modulator
• light scattering
• liquid crystal polymer composite
• reactive mesogens
• surface stabilized alignment

Acknowledgment

We thank the financial support of Canadian Institute for Photonic Innovations (CIPI), Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Nature et les Technologies (FQRNT) and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).