LC Alignment Characteristics of Novel Polyamide Alignment Films

Abstract

Novel liquid crystal (LC) alignment layers using polyamide films have been investigated. We propose three type of polyamide alignment films. All of them show relatively low pretilt angle and very high thermal stability of LC orientation and its pretilt angle. It is considered that such property is related to the thermal stability of uniform orientation of polymer itself. In addtion, one of them has a characteristic that the retardation on polymer surface induced by rubbing is very large. Furthermore, it was found that, by use of polyamide alignment films, good orientation of suface stabilized ferroelectric LCs is obtained.