Brightness Enhancement with a Fingerprint Chiral Nematic Liquid Crystal

Abstract

We demonstrate a brightness enhancement element that can be laminated to a linear polarizer for increasing the optical efficiency of a liquid crystal display device. The device structure is a chiral nematic liquid crystal (CNLC) with a fingerprint texture. For an unpolarized incident light, our experimental results show that the combination of a CNLC film and a conventional linear polarizer can achieve a transmittance of over 50%. The CNLC film increases the optical efficiency of a conventional polarizer by 21.7%. The detailed mechanism of such a CNLC-polarizer system is analyzed. (C) 2011 The Japan Society of Applied Physics