High contrast chiral nematic liquid crystal device using negative dielectric material

Abstract

A liquid crystal device is demonstrated using a short-pitch 260 nm chiral nematic with negative dielectric anisotropy. Due to dielectric coupling, an in-plane electric field switches the liquid crystal between the standing-helix field-off, “dark” state and lying-helix field-on, transmissive state configurations. We report experimental results on the optical transmission as a function of the applied field, the response time as short as 35 microseconds and the contrast ratio 1000:1.