Recovery of the electrically resistive properties of a degraded liquid crystal

Liquid crystals stored in vials and bottles are often found to degrade with time, trapping more and more ion impurity in the materials. Here we report on our identification of a major source causing such degradation and illustrate how the electrical properties of an old batch of liquid crystal can be restored by a regenerative agent. This approach, which is demonstrated to be quite efficient, entails simply soaking the agent in the liquid crystal.