Tunable chiral materials for multicolour reflective cholesteric displays

A polymerizable tunable chiral material (TCM) has been prepared for the fabrication of multicolour reflective cholesteric displays. This photosensitive chiral material, whose chirality is adjustable upon UV irradiation, enables us to adjust the pitch of a cholesteric material and thus to produce the three reflected colours (red, green and blue) for a multicolour reflective cholesteric display. Furthermore, the possibility of linking this compound to a polymer network helped to solve the problem of colour diffusion. Reflection spectra of the corresponding cells show broad reflection peaks, because of scattering from the large amount of polymerizable compound. We also report the difference of response under UV irradiation between this polymerizable tunable chiral material and a non-polymerizable material.