Ferroelectric Liquid Crystals. Material Properties and Applications

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Abstract
The last decade has seen a tremendous growth in the research and development activities in the area of ferroelectric liquid crystals. The field was opened up by the work of Meyer in 1974, and has now grown rapidly into one of the major research areas in liquid crystal science. The emphasis of the earlier work was on basic material characterization and phenomenology. Only very few liquid crystalline compounds exhibiting a ferroelectric phase were known at that time, and furthermore these Schiff-base organic compounds were chemically and thermally unstable and presented their ferroelectricity only at elevated temperatures. After the work by Clark and Lagerwall in 1980 on a fast electro-optic effect in a surface-stabilized ferroelectric liquid crystal (SSFLC) structure, both basic and applied research have accelerated, and today a great number of papers deal with development and characterization of ferroelectric compounds and mixtures and various aspects of device physics and manufacturing. It is of some interest in the present review to try to quantify this growth by plotting the number of research papers per year versus year. Such a plot is shown in Figure 1, where the development in solid state ferroelectrics is also shown.