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LCDs (liquid crystal displays)

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by Chris Woodford. Last updated: August 1, 2014.

Televisions used to be hot, heavy, power-hungry beasts that sat in the corner of your
living room. Not any more! Now they're slim enough to hang on the wall and they use
a fraction as much energy as they used to. Like laptop computers, most new
televisions have flat screens with LCDs (liquid-crystal displays)—the same technology
we've been using for years in things like calculators, cellphones, and digital watches.
What are they and how do they work? Let's take a closer look!

Photo: Small LCDs like this one have been widely used in calculators and digital
watches since the 1970s, but they were relatively expensive in those days and
produced only black-and-white (actually, dark-blueish and white) images. During the
1980s and 1990s, manufacturers figured out how to make larger color screens at
relatively affordable prices. That was when the market for LCD TVs and color laptop
computers really took off.
How does a television screen make its picture?
For many people, the most attractive thing about LCD TVs is not the way they make a
picture but their flat, compact screen. Unlike an old-style TV, an LCD screen is flat
enough to hang on your wall. That's because it generates its picture in an entirely
different way.

You probably know that an old-style cathode-ray tube (CRT) television makes a
picture using three electron guns. Think of them as three very fast, very precise
paintbrushes that dance back and forth, painting a moving image on the back of the
screen that you can watch when you sit in front of it.

Flatscreen LCD and plasma screens work in a completely different way. If you sit up
close to a flatscreen TV, you'll notice that the picture is made from millions of tiny
blocks called pixels (picture elements). Each one of these is effectively a separate red,
blue, or green light that can be switched on or off very rapidly to make the moving
color picture. The pixels are controlled in completely different ways in plasma and
LCD screens. In a plasma screen, each pixel is a tiny fluorescent lamp switched on or
off electronically. In an LCD television, the pixels are switched on or off electronically
using liquid crystals to rotate polarized light. That's not as complex as it sounds! To
understand what's going on, first we need to understand what liquid crystals are;
then we need to look more closely at light and how it travels.

Photo: This iPod screen is another example of LCD technology. Its pixels are colored
black and they're either on or off, so the display is black-and-white. In an LCD TV
screen, much smaller pixels colored red, blue, or green make a brightly colored
moving picture.

What are liquid crystals?

We're used to the idea that a given substance can be in one of three states: solid,
liquid, or gas—we call them states of matter—and up until the late 19th century,
scientists thought that was the end of the story. Then, in 1888, an Austrian chemist
named Friedrich Reinitzer (1857–1927) discovered liquid crystals, which are another
state entirely, somewhere in between liquids and solids. Liquid crystals might have
lingered in obscurity but for the fact that they turned out to have some very useful
properties.

Photo: Liquid crystals dried and viewed through polarized light. You can see they
have a much more regular structure than an ordinary liquid. Photo from research by
David Weitz courtesy of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (NASA-MSFC).

Solids are frozen lumps of matter that stay put all by themselves, often with their
atoms packed in a neat, regular arrangement called a crystal (or crystalline lattice).
Liquids lack the order of solids and, though they stay put if you keep them in a
container, they flow relatively easily when you pour them out. Now imagine a
substance with some of the order of a solid and some of the fluidity of a liquid. What
you have is a liquid crystal—a kind of halfway house in between. At any given
moment, liquid crystals can be in one of several possible "substates" (phases)
somewhere in a limbo-land between solid and liquid. The two most important liquid
crystal phases are called nematic and smectic:

When they're in the nematic phase, liquid crystals are a bit like a liquid: their
molecules can move around and shuffle past one another, but they all point in
 broadly the same direction. They're a bit like matches in a matchbox: you can
shake them and move them about but they all keep pointing the same way.
If you cool liquid crystals, they shift over to the smectic phase. Now the
molecules form into layers that can slide past one another relatively easily. The
molecules in a given layer can move about within it, but they can't and don't
move into the other layers (a bit like people working for different companies on
particular floors of an office block). There are actually several different smectic
"subphases," but we won't go into them in any more detail here.

Find out more

Want to know more about liquid crystals? There's a great page called History and
Properties of Liquid Crystals on the Nobel website.

What is polarized light?

Nematic liquid crystals have a really neat party trick. They can adopt a twisted-up
structure and, when you apply electricity to them, they straighten out again. That may
not sound much of a trick, but it's the key to how LCD displays turn pixels on and off.
To understand how liquid crystals can control pixels, we need to know about
polarized light.

Light is a mysterious thing. Sometimes it behaves like a stream of particles—like a

constant barrage of microscopic cannonballs carrying energy we can see, through the
air, at extremely high speed. Other times, light behaves more like waves on the sea.
Instead of water moving up and down, light is a wave pattern of electrical and
magnetic energy vibrating through space.
When sunlight streams down from the sky, the light waves are all mixed up and
vibrating in every possible direction. But if we put a filter in the way, with a grid of
lines arranged vertically like the openings in prison bars (only much closer together),
we can block out all the light waves except the ones vibrating vertically (the only light
waves that can get through vertical bars). Since we block off much of the original
sunlight, our filter effectively dims the light. This is how polarizing sunglasses work:
they cut out all but the sunlight vibrating in one direction or plane. Light filtered in
this way is called polarized or plane-polarized light (because it can travel in only one
plane).
If you have two pairs of polarizing sunglasses (and it won't work with ordinary
sunglasses), you can do a clever trick. If you put one pair directly in front of the other,
you should still be able to see through. But if you slowly rotate one pair, and keep the
other pair in the same place, you will see the light coming through gradually getting
darker. When the two pairs of sunglasses are at 90 degrees to each other, you won't be
able to see through them at all. The first pair of sunglasses blocks off all the light
waves except ones vibrating vertically. The second pair of sunglasses works in exactly
the same way as the first pair. If both pairs of glasses are pointing in the same
direction, that's fine—light waves vibrating vertically can still get through both. But if
we turn the second pair of glasses through 90 degrees, the light waves that made it
through the first pair of glasses can no longer make it through the second pair. No
light at all can get through two polarizing filters that are at 90 degrees to one another.

Photo: Right: A trick of the polarized light: rotate one pair of polarizing sunglasses
past another and you can block out virtually all the light that normally passes
through.

Photo: Left: A less well known trick of polarized light: it makes crystals gleam with
amazing spectral colors due to a phenomenon called pleochroism. Photo of protein
and virus crystals, many of which were grown in space. Credit: Dr. Alex McPherson,
University of California, Irvine. Photo courtesy of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center
(NASA-MSFC).

How LCD televisions use liquid crystals and polarized

light
An LCD TV screen uses the sunglasses trick to switch its colored pixels on or off. At the
back of the screen, there's a large bright light that shines out toward the viewer. In
front of this, there are the millions of pixels, each one made up of smaller areas called
sub-pixels that are colored red, blue, or green. Each pixel has a polarizing glass filter
behind it and another one in front of it at 90 degrees. That means the pixel normally
looks dark. In between the two polarizing filters there's a tiny twisted, nematic liquid
crystal that can be switched on or off (twisted or untwisted) electronically. When it's
switched on, it rotates the light passing through it through 90 degrees, effectively
allowing light to flow through the two polarizing filters and making the pixel look
bright. Each pixel is controlled by a separate transistor (a tiny electronic component)
that can switch it on or off many times each second.

Photo: Left: Prove to yourself that an LCD display uses polarized light. Simply put on a
pair of polarizing sunglasses and rotate your head (or the display). You'll see the
display at its brightest at one angle and at its darkest at exactly 90 degrees to that
angle.

Photo: Right: How liquid crystals switch light on and off. In one orientation, polarized
light cannot pass through the crystals so they appear dark (left side photo). In a
different orientation, polarized light passes through okay so the crystals appear bright
(right side photo). We can make the crystals change orientation—and switch their
pixels on and off—simply by applying an electric field. Photo from liquid crystal
research by David Weitz courtesy of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (NASA-MSFC).

How colored pixels in LCD TVs work

There's a bright light at the back of your TV; there are lots of colored squares
flickering on and off at the front. What goes on in between? Here's how each colored
pixel is switched on or off:
How pixels are switched off

1. Light travels from the back of the TV toward the front from a large bright light.
2. A horizontal polarizing filter in front of the light blocks out all light waves except
those vibrating horizontally.
3. Only light waves vibrating horizontally can get through.
4. A transistor switches off this pixel by switching on the electricity flowing
through its liquid crystal. That makes the crystal straighten out (so it's
completely untwisted), and the light travels straight through it unchanged.
5. Light waves emerge from the liquid crystal still vibrating horizontally.
6. A vertical polarizing filter in front of the liquid crystal blocks out all light waves
except those vibrating vertically. The horizontally vibrating light that travelled
through the liquid crystal cannot get through the vertical filter.
7. No light reaches the screen at this point. In other words, this pixel is dark.

How pixels are switched on

 1. The bright light at the back of the screen shines as before.
2. The horizontal polarizing filter in front of the light blocks out all light waves
except those vibrating horizontally.
3. Only light waves vibrating horizontally can get through.
4. A transistor switches on this pixel by switching off the electricity flowing
through its liquid crystal. That makes the crystal twist. The twisted crystal
rotates light waves by 90° as they travel through it.
5. Light waves that entered the liquid crystal vibrating horizontally emerge from it
vibrating vertically.
6. The vertical polarizing filter in front of the liquid crystal blocks out all light
waves except those vibrating vertically. The vertically vibrating light that
emerged from the liquid crystal can now get through the vertical filter.
7. The pixel is lit up. A red, blue, or green filter gives the pixel its color.

What's the difference between LCD and plasma?

A plasma screen looks similar to an LCD, but works in a completely different way:
each pixel is effectively a microscopic fluorescent lamp glowing with plasma. A
plasma is a very hot form of gas in which the atoms have blown apart to make
negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions (atoms minus their
electrons). These move about freely, producing a fuzzy glow of light whenever they
collide. Plasma screens can be made much bigger than ordinary cathode-ray tube
televisions, but they are also much more expensive.
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Find out more

On this website

LEDs, organic (OLEDs) and LEPs (light-emitting polymers)

Liquid crystals, thermochromic uses
Projection television
Solids, liquids, and gases
Television (general principles and cathode-ray tubes)

Books

Liquid Crystals by Sivaramakrishna Chandrasekhar. Cambridge University

Press, 1992. A classic textbook about the three types of liquid crystals, their
properties, and their various applications.
Liquid Crystals: Nature's Delicate Phase of Matter by Peter J. Collings. Princeton
University Press, 2002. An interdisciplinary book exploring the history, science,
and technology of liquid crystals and LCDs.
Crystals that Flow: Classic Papers from the History of Liquid Crystals by Timothy
J. Sluckin, David A. Dunmur, Horst Stegemeyer. Taylor & Francis, 2004. A
collection of important papers in liquid crystal research from 1888 to the 1970s,
with a short commentary on each..

Articles

How RCA Lost the LCD by Benjamin Gross. IEEE Spectrum, November 2012.
Although RCA owned the original patents for LCDs, it failed to turn them into a
winning commercial technology.
LCD pocket color TVs by Herbert Shuldiner, Popular Science, September 1984.
This is how Popular Science announced the arrival of compact LCD screens over
a quarter of a century ago. Includes quite a nice 3D diagram of how liquid
crystals twist polarized light.

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Text copyright © Chris Woodford 2007, 2009. All rights reserved. Full copyright notice
and terms of use.

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Woodford, Chris. (2007/2009) LCDs (liquid crystal displays). Retrieved from
http://www.explainthatstuff.com/lcdtv.html. [Accessed (Insert date here)]

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