Stability of pre-tilt angle and polar anchoring strength and its impact on the performance of liquid crystal devices.

: In this paper, the optical performance degradation of a liquid crystal (LC) cell due to the instability of pre-tilt angle and polar anchoring strength of the alignment surface of liquid crystal devices is explored. Under accelerated thermal treatment, changes in both the pre-tilt angle and polar anchoring strength are observed. The impacts of these changes are modeled for both twist nematic (TN) and electrically controlled birefringence (ECB) cells. Through this modeling, we find that a stable surface is very important to the long term performance of liquid crystal devices for the telecommunication applications.