Rotational Behavior of Stripe Domains Appearing in Hybrid Aligned Chiral Nematic Liquid Crystal Cells

The appearance of stripe domains is strongly affected by various cell conditions such as thickness, applied voltage, and surface alignment. In this work, we adopt hybrid surface alignment to investigate the appearance of stripe domains under asymmetric surface anchoring. It is observed that the stripe direction rotates continuously according to the cell thickness and applied voltage, which has potential as a unique diffraction grating. It is also found that the rotational response time is always several seconds for any size of cell, because a large area rotation is achieved by the sum of small poly domain rotations related to defect creation–extinction processes on their boundaries.