Abstract
In this study, we propose driving the amorphous blue phase III (BPIII) with a tilted electric field to enhance or magnify its inherent linear electro-optical properties. The electro-optical properties of in-plane-switching (IPS) BPIII and tilted-field-switching (TFS) BPIII cells are compared here. According to the change in the induced birefringence with varying the strength of the electric field in the TFS-BPIII cell, the Kerr effect occurs in the low electric field and the Pockels effect dominates in the high electric field. In addition, the transmittance of the TFS-BPIII cell depends on the polarity of the applied field from 1 Hz to 10 kHz. It also results in the rise time of the TFS-BPIII cell being almost half of that of the IPS-BPIII cell. These experimental results and discussion allowed us to unravel the mystery of the amorphous BPIII step by step and provide the potential application of BPIII in photonic devices.
Highlights
It is well known that liquid crystal (LC) made a truly interdisciplinary impact on modern technology from the 1970s to today, because the refractive index of liquid crystal can be tuned by external perturbations, such as temperature, electric field, and magnetic field
In the IPS-blue phase III (BPIII) cell, the distribution of the light intensity is more uniform as the cell gap increases; the light intensity is stronger in the thick-cell-gap IPS-BPIII
In the above we considered observing the electro-optical response of BPIII in a special distribution of the electric field, which has not been proposed before
Summary
It is well known that liquid crystal (LC) made a truly interdisciplinary impact on modern technology from the 1970s to today, because the refractive index of liquid crystal can be tuned by external perturbations, such as temperature, electric field, and magnetic field. We can find its application in lasers, diffraction gratings, spatial light modulators, dynamic lenses, flat panel displays, etc. Among those applications, the evolution of flat-panel displays is driven by developing the new switching modes of the liquid crystals. In order to get better display performance, researchers have tried to explore the liquid-crystal phase with chirality. Recent studies have focused on an intrinsic optical-isotropic phase in liquid crystal materials blue phases (BPs) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. The optical property of the BPs can be switched from optical isotropy to anisotropy when we apply a voltage on them. The direction of the field-induced optical axis is determined by the physical parameters of the LC and the direction of the applied field, and the field-dependence induced birefringence is explained by the Kerr effect [1,2]
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