Pretilt angle control and multidomain alignment of liquid crystals by using polyimide mixed with liquid crystalline prepolymer.

We propose a method to control the pretilt angle of liquid crystals by employing a mixture of the vertical alignment polyimide and the liquid crystalline prepolymer (LCP). The pretilt angle between 10° and 90° can be controlled continuously by changing the mixing ratio of the LCP. Multidomains with different pretilt angles can be formed because the pretilt angle between 50° and 90° can be obtained by varying the UV exposure time region by region under a fixed mixing ratio. We confirmed experimentally that proposed alignment layers are thermally stable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]