Observation of phase transitions in thresholdless antiferroelectric liquid crystal mixtures by measurements of optical rotatory power

Abstract

It has been reported that some mixtures of ferroelectric and antiferroelectric liquid crystals exhibit a continuous electric field response with no voltage threshold. This property is expected to improve the performance of displaying halftone, which was a drawback of ferroelectric liquid crystal displays, but the response mechanism is still unknown. In this study, we investigated the relaxation process of the voltage response of MC815-MC881 mixtures, which exhibit the continuous response, by measuring the optical rotatory power (ORP) of the samples with several mixing ratios.