Fabrication and analyses of negative-birefringent thin film compensator with characteristic matrix

Abstract

We fabricated a multilayer negative-birefringent film as a phase compensator to minimize light leakage from twisted nematic liquid crystal displays in oblique incidence. The multilayer film stack is composed of alternating thin layers of silicon dioxide and titanium dioxide, which is magnetron sputtered on the glass substrates. The experiment agrees with the characteristic matrix calculation. Since each layer is not ''thin'' enough compared with visible spectra, the multilayer thin stack induces interference phenomena, and consequently reduces the transmittance. In order to eliminate the interference, we optimized the multilayer thin film to achieve high transmittance in the region of visible spectra.