Experiments in switching the bistable boundary layer liquid crystal display by the application of dc

It has been previously reported that a liquid cystal display cell based on bistable boundary layer configurations can be switched between its bistable states by the application of dc. We report here the first experiments in the use of dc to switch an insulated cell. Included also are additional experiments with E7 in the cell of the previous report [R. B. Meyer and R. N. Thurston, Appl. Phys. Lett. 43, 342 (1983)] and a brief description of some observations with other materials. The results with the insulated cell are important because they show that the dc switching effect does not require charge transfer between the metallic electrodes and the liquid crystal.