Experimental study for the conditions of analog switching in ferroelectric liquid crystal cells

The authors study the effect of the spontaneous polarization (PS) of a ferroelectric liquid crystal mixture with compensated helix and of the thickness of the alignment layer (da) on the analog switching in a cell. The quality of analog switching is established in terms of its contrast ratio, texture in the dark state, and the electrostatic energy. The latter approximates to PS2 da for da d (thickness of the ferroelectric liquid crystal cell layer).