Nanoscience with liquid crystals

Topology with Liquid Crystals

With lasers or electron beams, it is now possible to mold a variety of soft and hard materials into different shapes with new properties and functionalities. These techniques also provide some of the few ways to generate topological shapes from mathematics, like knots and vortices, in a real-world system. In Physical Review Letters, Bryan Gin-ge Chen of the University of Pennsylvania (now at Le...

Photoalignment of liquid crystals by liquid crystals

We observed light-induced alignment of the nematic liquid crystal, 4, 4(')-n-pentylcyanobiphenyl (5CB), on a fused quartz. Irradiation of the adsorbed layer with polarized ultraviolet light produced homogeneous alignment in a 5CB-filled liquid crystal cell with the easy orientation axis perpendicular to the polarization direction. The measured anchoring energy increases with illumination up to ...

Light interacting with liquid crystals

In this paper we describe laser light interacting with nematic liquid crystals. The paper begins with a summary of recent experimental results of E. Braun, L. Faucbeux, and A. Libchaber in which the liquid crystal sample is studied in three geometries film, pipe, and droplet. Then, after a very brief glimpse at the history of liquid crystals, a theoretical model of the interacting system is des...

Molecular Crystals and Liquid Crystals

Molecular Crystals and Liquid Crystals

The problem of finding the equilibrium shape of a small particle by the Wulff construction is reviewed briefly, with emphasis on its applications to liquid crystals. The proof of Wulff’s theorem is stated in a concise mathematical form. Some typical equilibrium shapes of liquid crystalline cirops are described. When there is orientational order of the molecules in the liquid crystal but no tran...