title: Highly Polarized Fluorescent Illumination Using Liquid Crystal Phase.
abstract: Liquid crystal (LC) materials are currently the dominant electronic materials in display technology because of the ease of control of molecular orientation using an electric field. However, this technology requires the fabrication of two polarizers to create operational displays, reducing light transmission efficiency below 10%. It is therefore desirable to develop new technologies to enhance the light efficiency while maintaining or improving other properties such as the modulation speed of the molecular orientation. Here we report a uniaxial-oriented B7 smectic liquid crystalline film, using fluorescent bent-core LC molecules, a chemically modified substrate, and an in-plane electric field. A LC droplet under homeotropic boundary conditions of air/LC as well as LC/substrate exhibits large focal conic like optical textures. The in-plane electric field induced uniaxial orientation of the LC molecules, in which molecular polar directors are aligned in the direction of the electric field. This highly oriented LC film exhibits linearly polarized luminescence and microsecond time-scale modulation characteristics. The resultant device is both cheap and easy to fabricate and thus has great potential for electro-optic applications, including LC displays, bioimaging systems, and optical communications.
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Nanoscience and Technology, KAIST , Daejeon 305-701, Republic of Korea.
authors.forename: Min-Jun
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Gim
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Assam University , Silchar 788011, India.
authors.forename: Srikanth
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Turlapati
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Assam University , Silchar 788011, India.
authors.forename: Somen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Debnath
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Assam University , Silchar 788011, India.
authors.forename: Nandiraju V S
authors.initials: NV
authors.lastname: Rao
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Nanoscience and Technology, KAIST , Daejeon 305-701, Republic of Korea.
authors.forename: Dong Ki
authors.initials: DK
authors.lastname: Yoon
mesh_terms: D003201:Computers; D004581:Electronics / Q000295:instrumentation*; D005453:Fluorescence; D008029:Lighting / Q000295:instrumentation; D050866:Liquid Crystals / Q000737:chemistry*; D013499:Surface Properties
keywords: bent-core molecule; boundary condition; in-plane electric field; liquid crystal; polarized fluorescence