Effect of monomer concentration and functionality on electro-optical properties of polymer-stabilised optically isotropic liquid crystals

Optically isotropic nature can open a new type of high-performance liquid crystal (LC) displays. The main features emerge from the interaction between LC and polymer network at the interface. At this point, we investigated the influence of cross-linking monomer concentration and functionality on electro-optic properties of optically isotropic liquid crystal (OILC) obtained by polymerisation-induced phase separation method. Interestingly, we obtained a pore-like network structure constructed by highly interlinked polymer beads in acrylate monomers and achieved fast decay response time (0.6 ms). We found that the voltage-dependent hysteresis was mostly eliminated (~0.25%), and the contrast ratio was enhanced (1:1550) for high functional monomers. The result inspires a simple way to optimise the materials to fabricate a high-performance OILC device and it shows high-transparency, low-driving voltage, hysteresis-free and sub-millisecond response time.