Engineering Commons^™

Nematic Liquid Crystal Composite Materials For Dc And Rf Switching, Mohiuddin Munna, Farhana Anwar, Ronald A. Coutu Jr.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Liquid Crystals (LCs) are widely used in display devices, electro-optic modulators, and optical switches. A field-induced electrical conductivity modulation in pure liquid crystals is very low which makes it less preferable for direct current (DC) and radio-frequency (RF) switching applications. According to the literature, a conductivity enhancement is possible by nanoparticle doping. Considering this aspect, we reviewed published works focused on an electric field-induced conductivity modulation in carbon nanotube-doped liquid crystal composites (LC-CNT composites). A two to four order of magnitude switching in electrical conductivity is observed by several groups. Both in-plane and out-of-plane device configurations are used. In plane …