Photo: Liquid crystals dried and viewed through polarized light. You can see they have a much more regular structure than an ordinary liquid. Photo from research by David Weitz courtesy of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (NASA-MSFC).
We're used to the idea that a given substance can be in one of three states: solid, liquid, or gas—we call them states of matter—and up until the late 19th century, scientists thought that was the end of the story. Then, in 1888, an Austrian chemist named Friedrich Reinitzer (1857–1927) discovered liquid crystals, which are another state entirely, somewhere in between liquids and solids. Liquid crystals might have lingered in obscurity but for the fact that they turned out to have some very useful properties.
Solids are frozen lumps of matter that stay put all by themselves, often with their atoms packed in a neat, regular arrangement called a crystal (or crystalline lattice). Liquids lack the order of solids and, though they stay put if you keep them in a container, they flow relatively easily when you pour them out. Now imagine a substance with some of the order of a solid and some of the fluidity of a liquid. What you have is a liquid crystal—a kind of halfway house in between. At any given moment, liquid crystals can be in one of several possible "substates" (phases) somewhere in a limbo-land between solid and liquid. The two most important liquid crystal phases are called nematic and smectic:
nematic phase
, liquid crystals are a bit like a liquid: their molecules can move around and shuffle past one another, but they all point in broadly the same direction. They're a bit like matches in a matchbox: you can shake them and move them about but they all keep pointing the same way.smectic phase
. Now the molecules form into layers that can slide past one another relatively easily. The molecules in a given layer can move about within it, but they can't and don't move into the other layers (a bit like people working for different companies on particular floors of an office block). There are actually several different smectic "subphases," but we won't go into them in any more detail here.Want to know more about liquid crystals? There's a great page called History and Properties of Liquid Crystals, archived from the Nobel Prize website.
Nematic liquid crystals have a really neat party trick. They can adopt a twisted-up structure and, when you apply electricity to them, they straighten out again. That may not sound much of a trick, but it's the key to how LCD displays turn pixels on and off. To understand how liquid crystals can control pixels, we need to know about polarized light.
Light is a mysterious thing. Sometimes it behaves like a stream of particles—like a constant barrage of microscopic cannonballs carrying energy we can see, through the air, at extremely high speed. Other times, light behaves more like waves on the sea. Instead of water moving up and down, light is a wave pattern of electrical and magnetic energy vibrating through space.
Photo: A trick of the polarized light: rotate one pair of polarizing sunglasses past another and you can block out virtually all the light that normally passes through.
When sunlight streams down from the sky, the light waves are all mixed up and vibrating in every possible direction. But if we put a filter in the way, with a grid of lines arranged vertically like the openings in prison bars (only much closer together), we can block out all the light waves except the ones vibrating vertically (the only light waves that can get through vertical bars). Since we block off much of the original sunlight, our filter effectively dims the light. This is how polarizing sunglasses work: they cut out all but the sunlight vibrating in one direction or plane. Light filtered in this way is called polarized or plane-polarized light (because it can travel in only one plane).
Photo: A less well known trick of polarized light: it makes crystals gleam with amazing spectral colors due to a phenomenon called pleochroism. Photo of protein and virus crystals, many of which were grown in space. Credit: Dr. Alex McPherson, University of California, Irvine. Photo courtesy of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (NASA-MSFC).
If you have two pairs of polarizing sunglasses (and it won't work with ordinary sunglasses), you can do a clever trick. If you put one pair directly in front of the other, you should still be able to see through. But if you slowly rotate one pair, and keep the other pair in the same place, you will see the light coming through gradually getting darker. When the two pairs of sunglasses are at 90 degrees to each other, you won't be able to see through them at all. The first pair of sunglasses blocks off all the light waves except ones vibrating vertically. The second pair of sunglasses works in exactly the same way as the first pair. If both pairs of glasses are pointing in the same direction, that's fine—light waves vibrating vertically can still get through both. But if we turn the second pair of glasses through 90 degrees, the light waves that made it through the first pair of glasses can no longer make it through the second pair. No light at all can get through two polarizing filters that are at 90 degrees to one another.
Photo: Prove to yourself that an LCD display uses polarized light. Simply put on a pair of polarizing sunglasses and rotate your head (or the display). You'll see the display at its brightest at one angle and at its darkest at exactly 90 degrees to that angle.
An LCD TV screen uses the sunglasses trick to switch its colored pixels on or off.
At the back of the screen, there's a large bright light that shines out toward the viewer. In front of this, there are the millions of pixels, each one made up of smaller areas called sub-pixels that are colored red, blue, or green. Each pixel has a polarizing glass filter behind it and another one in front of it at 90 degrees. That means the pixel normally looks dark. In between the two polarizing filters there's a tiny twisted, nematic liquid crystal that can be switched on or off (twisted or untwisted) electronically. When it's switched off, it rotates the light passing through it through 90 degrees, effectively allowing light to flow through the two polarizing filters and making the pixel look bright. When it's switched on, it doesn't rotate the light, which is blocked by one of the polarizers, and the pixel looks dark. Each pixel is controlled by a separate transistor (a tiny electronic component) that can switch it on or off many times each second.
Photo: How liquid crystals switch light on and off. In one orientation, polarized light cannot pass through the crystals so they appear dark (left side photo). In a different orientation, polarized light passes through okay so the crystals appear bright (right side photo). We can make the crystals change orientation—and switch their pixels on and off—simply by applying an electric field. Photo from liquid crystal research by David Weitz courtesy of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (NASA-MSFC).
There's a bright light at the back of your TV; there are lots of colored squares flickering on and off at the front. What goes on in between? Here's how each colored pixel is switched on or off:
on
the electricity flowing through its liquid crystals. That makes the crystals straighten out (so they're completely untwisted), and the light travels straight through them unchanged.off
the electricity flowing through its liquid crystals. That makes the crystals twist. The twisted crystals rotate light waves by 90° as they travel through.A plasma screen looks similar to an LCD, but works in a completely different way: each pixel is effectively a microscopic fluorescent lamp glowing with plasma. A plasma is a very hot form of gas in which the atoms have blown apart to make negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions (atoms minus their electrons). These move about freely, producing a fuzzy glow of light whenever they collide. Plasma screens can be made much bigger than ordinary cathode-ray tube televisions, but they are also much more expensive.
Artwork: Richard Williams set out the principle of LCD displays in US Patent 3,322,485. A layer of liquid crystals (yellow) between two transparent plates (red) switches the display on and off when a voltage (blue) is applied. Artwork courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office.
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