Simple optical modeling of polarized fluorescent liquid crystal cells

We investigate the fluorescence emission properties of dye-doped nematic liquid crystal (LC) cells with planar and zigzag emissive layers. To explain the measured angular dependence of the emitted light (emission pattern), we introduce a simple optical model, in which both planar and zigzag emissive layers are approximated as a homogeneously oriented flat LC layer with an equivalent anisotropy. It was revealed that all the measured emission patterns under different LC molecular orientation conditions agree well with the optical model, whereas the conventional Lambertian-based distribution function does not coincide with the measured profile in homeotropically aligned LC cells.