Related Experiment Video
Updated: Mar 11, 2026
Preparation of Liquid Crystal Networks for Macroscopic Oscillatory Motion Induced by Light
Published on: September 20, 2017
Improvement in device performance from a mixture of a liquid crystal and photosensitive acrylic prepolymer with the
Czung-Yu Ho1, Fa-Hsin Lin2, Yu-Tai Tao3
1Institute of Chemistry, Academia Sinica, Taipei 115, Taiwan; Department of Materials Science and Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei 106, Taiwan.
Abstract:
In a multicomponent nematic liquid crystal (NLC) mixture of a liquid crystal (negative-type NLC) and a photosensitive acrylic prepolymer, photopolymerization upon UV irradiation induces the separation of the LC and photosensitive acrylic prepolymer layers, thereby leading to a vertical arrangement of LC molecules. In this study, we propose a simple vertical alignment method for LC molecules, by adding a chiral smectic A (SmA∗) liquid crystal having homeotropic texture characteristics to an NLC mixture solution. Measurements of electro-optical properties revealed that the addition of the SmA∗ LC not only strengthened the anchoring force of the copolymer alignment film surface, but also significantly enhanced the contrast ratio (∼73%), response time and grayscale switching performance of the device.
