An experimental study of single-film wide gamut multi-twist retarders

Multi-Twist Retarders (MTRs) are a class of complex retarders created by stacking multiple layers of various polymerizable nematic liquid crystal mixtures, where a chiral dopant may be added to each layer to control its twisting power. MTRs have a set of twist angles and thicknesses for each layer that are selected by use of a merit function. In this work, we utilize these degrees of freedom to create a single retarder film that can generate a variety of highly-chromatic retardation spectra, each selectable by the relative orientation of the MTR to the input polarization. Our goal in tuning is generation of multiple distinct color primaries, which when combined with patterning can generate full-color images in a single-film of liquid crystal.