Towards a polarized light‐emitting backlight: micro‐structured anisotropic layers

Abstract

Abstract— A backlight for liquid‐crystal‐display illumination is presented, in which s‐polarized light is preferentially coupled out by micro‐optical structures in a birefringent layer. In the experiments, contrasts higher than 15 have been obtained. A polarization dependent ray‐tracing model has been developed. Important guidelines for finding an optimal backlight configuration have been derived from the calculations.