A Light‐Emitting Liquid Crystal Display Device without Polarizers and Alignment Layers

Light‐emitting displays become the future direction of display technology for the radical requirement of reducing energy consumption. Here, an approach of fabricating a luminescent liquid crystal (LE‐LC) display device without polarizers and alignment layers is reported, achieved by using an aggregation‐induced emission (AIE)‐active LE‐LC mixture. Through studying the relationship between emission of the LE‐LC at several orientation modes and the concentration of the AIE‐featured fluorescent dye, the difference of fluorescence at aggregation state is revealed. When the concentration of the fluorescent dye is high enough, the emission of the planar‐aligned LE‐LCs is ≈4 times of the vertical‐aligned LE‐LCs. An electronically controlled LE‐LC cell is thus constructed, in which the homeotropic alignment of liquid crystals is induced by doping of CuInS2 nanoparticles. Therefore, this simple LE‐LC display avoids the use of polarizers and alignment layers, raising the exciting possibility of development of high efficiency and low energy‐consumption LE‐LC devices. A light‐emitting liquid crystal display device is successfully constructed, achieved by a luminescent liquid crystal system with aggregation‐induced emission. Without polarizers, this novel self‐luminous liquid crystal device utilizes the difference of emission between homeotropic and homogeneous alignment of the liquid crystals at the aggregation state, providing a promising approach to get energy‐saving liquid crystal devices with rather simplified fabrication process.