Pi-cell liquid crystal displays at arbitrary pretilt angles

The pi-cell is studied as a function of its pretilt angle. It is shown experimentally and theoretically that the critical holding voltage decreases as the pretilt angle increases. At high pretilt angles, the critical holding voltage becomes zero and the bend cell becomes stable. The measured total response time of the pi-cell decreases with the pretilt angle as well. There is almost a factor of 2 difference between the total response time of conventional pi-cell and the no-bias bend cell.