Appropriate Hydrogen-Incorporated Diamond-Like Carbon Film for Application to Liquid Crystal Display

Abstract

As an alternative alignment layer of polyimide, many kinds of alignment layers have been studied. Diamond-like carbon (DLC) is one of the good candidates due to its capability of aligning a liquid crystal (LC) homogeneously when it is irradiated by an ion beam (IB). To apply a DLC film to a display panel, not only LC alignment but also other properties such as pretilt angle, transmittance, resistivity, voltage holding ratio (VHR), and residual DC voltage (RDC) are important. One of the factors that affect these properties is hydrogen concentration within the DLC films. However, there are few research studies that elucidate the effects of hydrogen concentration on LC alignment and other properties in an LC cell. In this study, we showed the effects of hydrogen in a DLC film on several properties.