Optical design for excellent contrast ratio in a reflective horizontal-switching liquid crystal cell

In this paper, we propose an optical configuration for a reflective liquid crystal (LC) cell with a single polarizer that can show an excellent contrast ratio by effectively eliminating phase dispersion. The proposed configuration consists of a half-wave retarder, two A-plates, a quarter-wave LC cell and a reflector; the configuration was designed on a Poincaré sphere with the trigonometric method. From the calculation, we confirm that this configuration can show a high contrast ratio as compared with the conventional configuration due to the excellent dark state.