Michinori HONMA^*, Shigeki YAMAMOTO, and Toshiaki NOSE

Department of Electronics and Information Systems, Faculty of Systems Science and Technology, Akita Prefectural University, Yurihonjo, Akita 015-0055, Japan

(Received January 26, 2013; Accepted April 16, 2013)

We investigate the fluorescence emission properties of dye-doped nematic liquid crystal (LC) cells with planar and zigzag emissive layers. To explain the measured angular dependence of the emitted light (emission pattern), we introduce a simple optical model, in which both planar and zigzag emissive layers are approximated as a homogeneously oriented flat LC layer with an equivalent anisotropy. It was revealed that all the measured emission patterns under different LC molecular orientation conditions agree well with the optical model, whereas the conventional Lambertian-based distribution function does not coincide with the measured profile in homeotropically aligned LC cells.

Key words: liquid crystal, fluorescent liquid crystal, polarized backlight, polarization ratio, Lambertian profile

^*E-mail address: mhonma@akita-pu.ac.jp