A grating surface can drive the liquid crystal molecules to orientate along the direction parallel or vertical to the projected plane of the grating surface. The nematic liquid crystal （NLC） cell manufactured with two pre-treated grating surface substrates may realize the vertical display, parallel display and twist display. In this paper, the threshold property of this NLC cell is investigated systematically. With the Frank elastic theory and the equivalent anchoring energy formula of grating surface substrate, the analytic expressions of the threshold voltage related to three displays are obtained, which are dependent on their geometrical parameters such as amplitude ~ and pitch A of the grating surface substrate. For a certain anchoring strength, the threshold voltage increases or decreases with the increase of the value δ/λ of the different displays.
Liquid crystal in a nematic liquid crystal cell surface with two crossed-grating surface substrates can be oriented along the normal grating direction with given geometric parameters of groove and anchoring strength. This display is equivalent to multi-domain vertical-alignment mode. It has a relatively wide viewing angle. In this letter, we investigate the viewing angle characteristics of this kind of cell. The viewing angle dependence of contrast ratio is obtained using the extended Jones matrix method, which also considers the flexoelectric effect. The viewing angle is dependent on the geometric parameter of grating surface, the flexoelectric coefficients, and the anchoring strength. Therefore, appropriate value for each factor needs to be selected to obtain a better viewing angle of this cell.
A homogeneous-aligned, high-transmission, and fast-response liquid crystal display （LCD） with three-layer electrodes is proposed. The molecules of liquid crystals are more inclined to rotate above and between the pixel electrodes. This induces a much higher transmission than that of the cell driven by the fringe field switching method and a wide viewing angle simultaneously because of the combined fringe and in-plane electric fields. Furthermore, a trigger pulse voltage is applied between the top and common electrodes to forcibly align the liquid crystal molecules vertically to show the transient dark state, which results in a very fast turn-off time （-1 ms）. With high degree of transmission and fast response time, this kind of LCD is a potential candidate for large LCD panels.
