Controlled Tilted Homeotropic Alignment of Liquid Crystals for Display Applications

A new method to obtain nearly homeotropic alignment with small pretilt angles off the substrate normal employing vacuum oblique evaporation of SiOx has been developed. Selected pretilt angles in the range of (0–5) degrees can be easily obtained with this method and it is not very sensitive to the deposition angle, angle between the substrate normal and the direction of evaporation, or the SiOx layer thickness, giving the flexibility of preparing very clean alignment layers on large area substrates. This could be useful in making high contrast liquid crystal light valves for projection displays and multi-domain liquid crystal displays.