Improved electro-optical properties of ferroelectric liquid crystal by incorporating alloyed quaternary ZnCuGaS₂/ZnS core/shell quantum dots

ABSTRACT

KCFLC 7S, a ferroelectric liquid crystal (FLC) shows improved dielectric and electro-optic properties by the incorporation of alloyed quaternary ZnCuGaS₂/ZnS core/shell (ZCZ) quantum dots (QDs). Four different Zn alloyed ZCZ QDs (ZCZ-0, ZCZ-0.5, ZCZ-1, and ZCZ-1.5) incorporated in FLC and have been studied with the help of optical, dielectric and ferroelectric characterisations. Substantial changes of optical contrast, molecular ordering, photoluminescence, dielectric constant, dielectric loss factor, response time, and helical pitch of FLC are observed and attributed to varying molecular ordering. The effective confinement of exciton wavefunction in core of QDs results in improved molecular ordering of FLC material. The Zn alloyed ZCZ QDs incorporated FLC may be resulted for future brighter, high contrast, large viewing angle and memory based display device.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Ferroelectric liquid crystals
• molecular ordering
• tilt angle
• chiral smectic C phase
• eco-friendly display
• core/shell quantum dots

Acknowledgments

N. P. thanks to Department of Physics, S. P. Pune University, India and K. J. Somaiya College, Kopargaon, India for financial and other support. A. H. thanks to Department of Physics, S. P. Pune University for Prof. B. B. Laud Fellowship and other financial support. The authors are thankful to Dr. Raghavendra V. Reddy, UGC-DAE Consortium for Scientific Research, Indore, for ferroelectric and dielectric measurements. Authors also thankful to Dr. N. B. Chaure from Department of Physics, S. P. Pune University, India for generous help of thickness measurement of LC sample cells using dielectric measurements. The authors would also like to acknowledge Department of Physics, S. P. Pune University, India for other characterization techniques.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02678292.2023.2276841