Elimination of off-axis light leakage in a homogeneously-aligned liquid crystal cell

Among various liquid crystal display modes, the in-plane switching mode exhibits the widest viewing angle because the liquid crystals are homogeneously-aligned initially and rotate within a plane parallel to the substrates when an in-plane field is applied. However, further improvement is still needed for viewing high-quality dark images from the bisector direction of the crossed polarizers. Several compensation schemes have been proposed to eliminate the off-axis light leakage in a homogeneously-aligned liquid crystal cell. Although a 100: 1 iso-contrast contour at an wavelength of 550 nm can cover the entire viewing cone, light leakage at other wavelengths still remains very severe. In this paper we introduce achromatic optical compensation methods using uniaxial films to eliminate the off-axis light leakage at the dark state in homogeneously-aligned liquid crystal cell. Uniaxial films with different dispersion characteristics are used so that they can compensate one another to achieve achromatic optical compensation. The retardation values are optimized through numerical research with the aid of the Poincare sphere.