Effects of polymer networks on stabilization and switching characteristics of cholesteric liquid crystals

Abstract

Transmission experiments demonstrated that the presence of a phase-separated polymer network was responsible for the stabilization of the focal-conic texture of a cholesteric liquid crystal. Upon introduction of geometrically fixed defects, the highly scattering multi-domain texture became stabilized over the planar texture. Furthermore, it was found that the crosslinking density of the stabilizing polymer network has a decisive influence on the switching characteristics of the liquid crystal. For example, the turn-off switching time can be varied by one order of magnitude (20-200 msec) and the switching voltage of the system varied between 0.5-5 Vrms/μm.