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Ultra high speed liquid crystals

20.08.2013

A group of American researchers from the University of Kent was able to increase the speed of liquid crystal control by orders of magnitude. Physicists have found a way to shorten the time it takes for molecules to return to their original state after the electric field is turned off. This process, instead of one millisecond, now takes only about 30 nanoseconds.

The scientists used a new method of changing the molecular structure of liquid crystals under the action of an electric field, and also abandoned the control of transparency by rotating the plane of polarization of light. Instead of rotating all the molecules at once and turning the plane of polarization, physicists changed the mutual orientation of the molecules, the shape of which, in the first approximation, is a flattened ellipsoid. Such ellipsoids in the absence of an electric field are already "slightly" ordered, and its inclusion leads to the fact that the ellipsoids are stacked and the degree of ordering increases sharply.

Having assembled a pilot setup from a laser, several polarizers and an experimental cell with liquid crystals, physicists showed that the increase in ordering leads to the fact that when light passes through the cell, the effect of birefringence is enhanced. Rays of light with different directions of the polarization plane diverge more strongly in different directions, and this effect can already be applied to control transparency using polarizing filters. This method, as the authors emphasize, does not make it possible to make the cell absolutely opaque, but the head of the research group, Oleg Lavrentovich, believes that the method can be significantly improved.

Cells that rotate the plane of polarization are at the heart of all modern LCD technology. Liquid crystal molecules can either move from a mixture of two mutually perpendicular states to a state when they are oriented in one direction (TN technology), or simply rotate 90 degrees (IPS, VA and derivatives) in one of two independent layers. The turn of molecules when the field is turned on is very fast, but when the field is turned off, the transition to the initial state takes at least one millisecond.

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