New material could make LCD screens better

​Researchers in Moscow have developed a new form of liquid crystal that could be used to make electronic screens sharper, faster and more efficient.

Existing displays are made up of layers of crystals in red, blue and green. An electric field is used to turn individual pixels on and off, and form an image – the human eye does the job of averaging the different reds, blues and greens it sees into other colours.

The new innovation is a ferroelectric liquid crystal (FLC), explained Alexander Emelyanenko, who worked on the research at Moscow State University. “FLC possesses the spontaneous electrical polarization that allows one to enlarge the order of the operation speed several times of magnitude,” he said. “FLC materials allow one to use the field sequential colour display, in which the red blue and green light are averaged by the human's eyes in time, but not in space.”

The material could give LCD screens a higher resolution, because instead of three pixels being used to create one spot of colour, an individual pixel can cycle between red, blue and green. It could also create a faster ‘refresh rate’ by allowing individual liquid crystals to be ‘opened’ and ‘closed’ fasters.

It could also be more efficient, according to Emelyanenko. “The development of the field sequential colour displays will make their production considerably cheaper and improve their optical characteristics such as brightness, colour gamut, and resolution (as each pixel will work on its own, not as one of the three subpixels),” he says. “This will also help save up to 70% of energy consumed by a display, as the source of light may be made much less bright without affecting the brightness of the screen."