Abstract

New liquid crystals applications are being developed apart from optics, imaging and display systems. A liquid crystal cell can be modeled as a nonlinear capacitor, being its capacitance varied as a function of the applied electric field. A feedback resonator composed of a capacitance and an inductance presents an oscillation frequency depending on the value of these components. A tunable feedback resonator based on a nematic liquid crystal cell as variable capacitance is presented. The circuit has been electrically modeled and validated with experimental measurements. Oscillation frequencies in the range of kHz have been obtained for the combination of the inductance and the liquid crystal cell (capacitance) used in the proposed circuit. New applications for this circuit are currently under study.