Most new technologies progress slowly from the initial discovery of the principles to a functioning product. Instead, Praveen Chaudhari of IBM's Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and collaborators in California and at IBM Japan Ltd today unveil a laptop resplendent with a full-colour screen coated in the new material. Rubbing, van Haaren points out, is universally used for liquid-crystal alignment today, but it is nobody's preference for the LCDs of tomorrow.
Liquid crystals act like shutters in display screens.
This switching is induced very quickly by an electric field. A liquid crystal generally consists of rod-shaped molecules. They jostle one another into alignment like logs on a river. Because of this molecular arrangement, some liquid crystals can affect the plane of polarized light. So a typical LCD cell consists of a liquid crystal sandwiched between two perpendicular polarizing filters.