Liquid and liquid crystal surfaces

Liquid Crystal Materials and Liquid Crystal Displays

Since the early 1970s, three major prerequisites have brought the success of the liquid crystal display (LCD) technology to its key role of today. Namely, the discovery of electro-optical field-effects on which the displays are based, the successful search for liquid crystals (LCs) with material properties that meet the complex requirements of electro-optical effects and render the effects appl...

Liquid crystal pretilt control by inhomogeneous surfaces.

We consider the pretilt alignment of a nematic liquid crystal (LC) on inhomogeneous surface patterns comprising patches of homeotropic alignment domains in a matrix favoring homogeneous alignment, or vice versa. We found that the resultant LC pretilt generally increases continuously from the homogeneous limit to the homeotropic limit as the area fraction of the homeotropic region increases from...

Temperature Tunability of Dielectric/ Liquid Crystal / Dielectric Photonic Crystal Structures

Recently, photonic crystals doped with liquid crystal (LC) material havegained much research interest. In this article new ternary one-dimensional photoniccrystal introduced and studied. The liquid crystal layer of 5CB and 5PCH is sandwichedby two dielectric layers. For the first time, we use four structures SiO2/UCF35/CaF2,SiO2/5CB/CaF2, NFK51/UCF35/NPSK53 and NFK51/5CB/NPSK53. The effect ofte...

Columnar liquid crystal as a unique ferroelectric liquid crystal

Crystal templating through liquid-liquid phase separation.

Controlled induction of crystal nucleation is a highly desirable but elusive goal. Attempts to speed up crystallization, such as high super saturation or working near a liquid-liquid critical point, always led to irregular and uncontrollable crystal growth. Here, we show that under highly nonequilibrium conditions of spinodal decomposition, water crystals grow as thin wires in a template-less f...