A New Liquid Crystal Acoustical-to-Optical Display

In the last decade several attempts have been made to develop a real-time acoustical-tooptical display. Temperature sensitive liquid crystals have been utilized with some degree of success, although the time and intensity required to obtain the color change and the insufficient resolution make this method unsuitable for practical purposes. Recently, it was proposed to use nematic liquid crystal cells biased with electric or magnetic field. Alignment of the liquid crystals can, however, be obtained by chemical means too. It proved that cells based on this concept may act as real-time acoustical-to-optical converters.