A Light-Emitting Liquid Crystal Display Device without Polarizers and Alignment Layers

Light-emitting displays become the future direction of display technology for the radical requirement of reducing energy consumption. Here, an approach of fabricating a luminescent liquid crystal (LE-LC) display device without polarizers and alignment layers is reported, achieved by using an aggregation-induced emission (AIE)-active LE-LC mixture. Through studying the relationship between emission of the LE-LC at several orientation modes and the concentration of the AIE-featured fluorescent dye, the difference of fluorescence at aggregation state is revealed. When the concentration of the fluorescent dye is high enough, the emission of the planar-aligned LE-LCs is ≈4 times of the vertical-aligned LE-LCs. An electronically controlled LE-LC cell is thus constructed, in which the homeotropic alignment of liquid crystals is induced by doping of CuInS₂ nanoparticles. Therefore, this simple LE-LC display avoids the use of polarizers and alignment layers, raising the exciting possibility of development of high efficiency and low energy-consumption LE-LC devices.