Twisted nematic field effect

In 1962, Richard Williams, a physical chemist working at RCA Laboratories, started seeking new physical phenomena that might yield a display technology without vacuum tubes. Aware of the long line of research involving nematic liquid crystals, he started experimenting with the compound p-azoxyanisole which has a melting point of 115 °C (239 °F). Williams set up his experiments on a heated microscope stage, placing samples between transparent tin-oxide electrodes on glass plates held at 125 °C (257 °F). He discovered that a very strong electrical field applied across the stack would cause striped patterns to form. These were later termed "Williams domains".[1] The required field was about 1,000 volts per centimeter, far too high for a practical device. Realizing that development would be lengthy, he turned the research over to physicist George Heilmeier and moved on to other work.

In 1964, RCA's George H. Heilmeier along with Louis Zanoni and chemist Lucian Barton discovered that certain liquid crystals could be switched between a transparent state and a highly scattering opaque one with the application of electric current. The scattering was primarily forward, into the crystal, as opposed to backscattering towards the light source. By placing a reflector on the far side of the crystal, the incident light could be turned on or off electrically, creating what Heilmeier dubbed dynamic scattering. In 1965 Joseph Castellano and Joel Goldmacher, organic chemists, sought crystals that remained in the fluid state at room temperature. Within six months they had found a number of candidates, and with further development, RCA was able to announce the first liquid crystal displays in 1968.[1]

Although successful, the dynamic scattering display required constant current flow through the device, as well as relatively high voltages. This made them unattractive for low-power situations, where many of these sorts of displays were being used. Not being self-lit, LCDs also required external lighting if they were going to be used in low-light situations, which made existing display technologies even more unattractive in overall power terms. A further limitation was the requirement for a mirror, which limited the viewing angles. The RCA team was aware of these limitations, and continued development of a variety of technologies.

One of these potential effects had been discovered by Heilmeier in 1964. He was able to get organic dyes to attach themselves to the liquid crystals, and they would stay in position when pulled into alignment by an external field. When switched from one alignment to the other, the dye was either visible or hidden, resulting in two colored states called the guest-host effect. Work on this approach stopped when the dynamic scattering effect had been demonstrated successfully.[1]

Another potential approach was the twisted-nematic approach, which had first been noticed by French physicist Charles-Victor Mauguin in 1911. Mauguin was experimenting with a variety of semi-solid liquid crystals when he noted that he could align the crystals by pulling a piece of paper across them, causing the crystals to become polarized. He later noticed when he sandwiched the crystal between two aligned polarizers, he could twist them in relation to each other, but the light continued to be transmitted. This was not expected. Normally if two polarizers are aligned at right angles, light will not flow through them. Mauguin concluded that the light was being re-polarized by the twisting of the crystal itself.[1]

Wolfgang Helfrich, a physicist who joined RCA in 1967, became interested in Mauguin's twisted structure and thought it might be used to create an electronic display. However RCA showed little interest because they felt that any effect that used two polarizers would also have a large amount of light absorption, requiring it to be brightly lit. In 1970, Helfrich left RCA and joined the Central Research Laboratories of Hoffmann-LaRoche in Switzerland, where he teamed up with Martin Schadt, a solid-state physicist. Schadt built a sample with electrodes and a twisted version of a liquid-crystal material called PEBAB (p-ethoxybenzylidene-p'-aminobenzonitrile), which Helfrich had reported in prior studies at RCA, as part of their guest-host experiments.[1] When voltage is applied, PEBAB aligns itself along the field, breaking the twisting structure and the redirection of the polarization, making the cell turn opaque.

At this time Brown, Boveri & Cie (BBC) was also working with the devices as part of a prior joint medical research agreement with Hoffmann-LaRoche.[2] BBC demonstrated their work to a physicist from the US who was associated with James Fergason, an expert in liquid crystals at the Westinghouse Research Laboratories. Fergason was working on the TN-effect for displays, having formed ILIXCO to commercialize developments of the research being carried out in conjunction with Sardari Arora and Alfred Saupe at Kent State University's Liquid Crystal Institute.[3]

When news of the demonstration reached Hoffmann-LaRoche, Helfrich and Schadt immediately pushed for a patent, which was filed on 4 December 1970. Their formal results were published in Applied Physics Letters on 15 February 1971. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of the new effect for displays, Schadt fabricated a 4-digit display panel in 1972.[1]

Fergason published a similar patent in the US on either 9 February 1971[1] or 22 April 1971.[3] This was two months after the Swiss patent was filed and set the stage for a three-year legal confrontation that was settled out of court. In the end, all the parties received a share of what would become many millions of dollars in royalties.

PEBAB was subject to breakdown when exposed to water or alkalines, and required special manufacturing to avoid contamination. In 1972 a team led by George W. Gray developed a new type of cyanobiphenyls that could be mixed with PEBAB to produce less reactive materials.[4] These additives also made the resulting liquid less viscous, thereby providing faster response times, while at the same time making them more transparent, which produced a pure-white color display.

This work, in turn, led to the discovery of an entirely different class of nematic crystals by Ludwig Pohl, Rudolf Eidenschink and their colleagues at Merck KGaA in Darmstadt, called cyanophenylcyclohexanes. They quickly became the basis of almost all LCDs, and remain a major part of Merck's business today.[5]