Tunable meta-color with liquid crystal modulator

Abstract

High resolution and durability are considered very important factors in display. Structural color induced by reflection or transmission of light from micro- or nano-structures has a potential with high resolution, environmental protection and high durability against chemical pigments and dyes. To realize structural color, metasurface composed of structures with subwavelength-scale has been proposed and called ‘meta-color’. Moreover, these meta-colors are recently combined with liquid crystals (LCs) for dynamic color transition. In this work, we suggest the tunable meta-color via integration of reflective metasurface with LC modulator. The system is consisted of polarization dependence metasurface and polarization modulator LCs. The polarization of the light is controlled by reorientation of LC molecules with in-plane electrical field. As a result, we realized the full-color active system for RGB colors with gray scale. Additionally, the mixing of two colors such as magenta, cyan and yellow is also realized on a pixel. This work was supported by the Korea National Research Foundation (NRF-2021R1A4A1030944 & 2021R1A2C2095010).