Time-varying ionic properties of a liquid-crystal cell

This work investigates time-evolved ionic characteristics of a homogeneously aligned cell composed of a low-resistivity nematic liquid crystal. The influence of montmorillonite as a nanoadditive is studied on the dielectric spectrum of the cell. The incorporation of the inorganic nanoplatelets into the nematic leads to decrease in conductivity in the frequency range from 10 Hz to at least 10 kHz. The dielectric spectroscopic results show that the conductivity, ionic concentration, and diffusion constant of both undoped and doped cells are strongly time-dependent after the cell fabrication. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3464564]