Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland.
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin 8, Ireland.
Nat Commun. 2016 May 9;7:11369. doi: 10.1038/ncomms11369.
Liquid crystals (LCs) represent one of the foundations of modern communication and photonic technologies. Present display technologies are based mainly on nematic LCs, which suffer from limited response time for use in active colour sequential displays and limited image grey scale. Herein we report the first observation of a spontaneously formed helix in a polar tilted smectic LC phase (SmC phase) of achiral bent-core (BC) molecules with the axis of helix lying parallel to the layer normal and a pitch much shorter than the optical wavelength. This new phase shows fast (∼30 μs) grey-scale switching due to the deformation of the helix by the electric field. Even more importantly, defect-free alignment is easily achieved for the first time for a BC mesogen, thus providing potential use in large-scale devices with fast linear and thresholdless electro-optical response.
液晶（LCs）是现代通信和光子技术的基础之一。目前的显示技术主要基于向列相液晶，其在主动彩色顺序显示中的响应时间有限，图像灰度也有限。在此，我们报告了在无手性弯曲核（BC）分子的倾斜层状近晶 C 相（SmC 相）中自发形成螺旋的首次观察结果，螺旋的轴与层法线平行，螺距比光学波长短得多。由于电场使螺旋变形，这种新相表现出快速（约 30μs）灰度切换。更重要的是，BC 介晶首次实现了无缺陷的取向，从而为具有快速线性和无阈值电光响应的大规模器件提供了潜在用途。
Zotero 插件
