Reverse tilt domains in liquid crystal cells with a splayed director configuration

Abstract

When an electric field is applied to a nematic liquid crystal cell with splay alignment layers, which is realized by mechanical parallel rubbing, the system exhibits abnormal reverse tilt domains. Even though the system has pretilt angle due to symmetry breaking by rubbing, existence of singular point in a cell by splay geometry and shift of that by locally asymmetric pretilt angle configurations result in the abnormal reverse tilt domains. On the basis of Oseen-Frank theory, dependence of singular point upon the abnormal reverse tilt domains is theoretically investigated for a splay alignment liquid crystal cell. By using the Dickman’s Q-tensor method [SID Int. Symp. Digest Tech. Papers 24, 638 (1993)], liquid crystal director field is calculated for the splay-aligned liquid crystal cell that an electric field is applied to. We presume a model to explain the abnormal reverse tilt domains, and derive the conditions required for the generation and elimination of these domains.