Recent advances on polymer-stabilized blue phase liquid crystal materials and devices

Polymer-stabilized blue phase liquid crystals (PS-BPLC) have become an increasingly important technology trend for information display and photonics applications. BPLCs exhibit several attractive features, such as reasonably wide temperature range, submillisecond gray-to-gray response time, no need for alignment layer, optically isotropic voltage-off state, and large cell gap tolerance. However, some bottlenecks such as high operation voltage, hysteresis, residual birefringence, charging issues due to the large capacitance, and relatively low transmittance remain to be overcome before their widespread applications can be realized. Recent progress on BPLC materials and devices has shown great promise. To realize the electro-optic effect of PS-BPLC, two driving modes: in-plane switching and vertical field switching mode, have been developed. The material system of PS-BPLC, including nematic LC host, chiral dopant, and polymer network, are discussed. Each component plays an essential role affecting the stability and electro-optic properties of PS-BPLC. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2014, 131, 40556.