High performance low-cost polarizer using depolarization of a polarized light by reactive mesogen.

Currently, the polyethlene terephthalate (PET) film challenges to substitute Tri-acetyl cellulouse (TAC) film which is a protection film in a polarizer layer, because of low cost of PET film. On the contrary, the PET film shows an optical problem such that color shift or interference optical pattern in oblique direction can occur because the film is made with the lamination process, which induces high phase retardation. In this paper, we propose a color shift free low cost polarizer by polymerization of random oriented reactive mesogen (RM) on the PET film. We calculate the viewing angle performance of the polarizer with the conventional PET film, with the TAC film and with the proposed PET film. As a result, we confirm that the proposed optical configuration can satisfy the optical performance equivalent to that of conventional TAC film uses in addition to the cost-down.