Gold nanoparticles may help producing greener and faster LCD

LQ13486 - Can liquid crystal displays (LCD) be greener and faster? Physicists are now developing a new approach to do both. In a LCD, LC molecules are well aligned, with the first layer of LC molecules anchored on a substrate. Strong anchoring is important for high contrast display, but higher voltage is necessary to get the display to work, and the display responds slowly. People used to believe that anchoring strength is fixed once a device is packaged. Physicists have now found that, by placing gold nanoparticles on substrate and using an effect called localized surface plasmon resonance, it is possible to manipulate the anchoring by orders of magnitude with a weak light beam, because the light excites gold nanoparticles and boosts the light intensity in its neighborhood. The strong local field effectively lowers the anchoring strength at will. The dynamic reduction of anchoring strength also helps in speeding-up the response of LC display.