Optically Isotropic Liquid Crystal Mode Templated by Nanoporous Breath Figure Membrane

Young Chul Shin, Ji Sub Park, Kyung Il Joo, Hyun Gyu Kim, Ramesh Manda, Jun Chan Choi, Hak Rin Kim

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this study, a printing-based scalable method is proposed for the higher density of a liquid crystal (LC) nanodroplet structure suitable for the optically isotropic LC mode where the LC nanodomains are accurately templated by a nanoporous breath figure (BF) membrane. The highly porous BF polymeric template structure is reliably obtained by utilizing self-structured packing effects of the silica nanospheres achieved by doctor blade coating. A nanocomposite film with densely packed silica nanospheres encapsulated by the UV-crosslinked polymer matrix is made by controlling the blade coating velocity and blade gap conditions. This provides a higher LC fill-factor condition of the optically isotropic nanodroplet LC (OI-NDLC) mode with filling the LCs into the nanopores obtained after selective silica etching. The OI-NDLC structure templated by the nanoporous BF membrane made with the silica nanospheres of 300 nm can effectively resolve the scattering-induced optical loss and depolarization issues observable in the OI-NDLC mode prepared by conventional phase separation approaches due to the sufficiently reduced LC droplet size. The structure exhibits a much-improved light leakage level in the field-off optically isotropic state, a higher transmittance level as the field-induced Kerr operation, and resultant improved contrast ratio properties.

Original languageEnglish
Article number2101919
JournalAdvanced Materials Interfaces
Volume9
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - 2 Mar 2022

Keywords

  • depolarization effects
  • displays
  • liquid crystals
  • nanodroplet liquid crystals
  • optically isotropic mode

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