Unidirectional Liquid Crystal Pretilt Generation on Asymmetric Nanoscaled Groove Pattern Driven by Atomic Force Microscopic Tip

Abstract

We demonstrate uniformly and unidirectionally distributed pretilt characteristics of a liquid crystal cell fabricated via a substrate with a scan-directional slant nanosized surface groove pattern driven through an atomic force microscopic (AFM) tip that is continuously modulating the contact force in the scanning line direction. The resultant electro-optic characteristics of the liquid crystal (LC) cell made by our advanced AFM lithography technique show that it generates a unidirectional pretilt that guarantees wider LC applications. (C) 2012 The Japan Society of Applied Physics