A new method to align liquid crystal molecules by linear photo-polymerization for liquid crystal displayProject supported by Jilin Province Developmental Plan Committee of Sciences and Technology (Grant No. 19990515).

A new technique to uniformly align liquid crystal molecules is presented. The technique is based on producing an anisotropic surface on the glass substrate coated with photo-polymers by photo-polymerization of linear polarized UV-light. The orientation of liquid crystal molecules is governed by the direction of the polarized vector of UV-light. Using this method, we have studied the photo-polymer PSi-CM aligning LC 6710A molecules. The liquid crystal microscopic texture between crossed polarizers, optical retardation from liquid crystal layers and electro-optical properties of twisted nematic liquid crystal display cell are obtained, which was prepared with one side -photo-alignment and the other side-rebbed substrate.