Polarizer-free liquid crystal display with electrically switchable microlens array

Abstract

We propose a polarizer-free liquid crystal display (LCD) with an electrically switchable microlens array. The incident lights are controlled to focused or defocused states by index matching of the lens polymer and LC layer. By adopting two light-blocking masks that have a circular stop pattern and the complementary open pattern, the LCD was able to realize the entire gray scale. Additionally, to achieve fast response time characteristics, we introduce polymerized RMs within the alignment layers.