Photostability of liquid crystals and alignment layers

Alignment of Ferroelectric Liquid Crystals with Photoanisotropic Azodye Aligning Layers

The photo-induced alignment quality of a ferroelectric liquid crystas (FLC) onto a photochemical stable azodye film was studied for various procedures of the azodye film photo-treatment and the FLC structure. The alignment quality of FLC depends mainly on the order parameter of the azodye film, however the structure of FLC layer is also important. So, the photo-aligned deformed helix ferroelect...

Effect of Surface Alignment Layers on the Configurational Transitions in Cholesteric Liquid Crystals

To understand the mechanism behind the pitch change during the transient planar to the planar state transition of a cholesteric liquid crystal ͑while it is relaxing from the homeotropic state to the planar state͒, we studied a more controlled situation of pitch change in a thermochromic liquid crystal. We studied the pitch change in the liquid crystal, as a function of temperature, under various ...

Substrate-induced bulk alignment of liquid crystals.

Self-alignment of liquid crystals in three-dimensional photonic crystals.

We report on the observation of self-alignment of nematic liquid crystals into colloidal photonic crystals, over distances much larger than the typical size of the voids between the spheres. We observe that the infiltrated structure possesses a unique optical axis that is determined by an intrinsic structural anisotropy of photonic crystal opals. We develop a simple model to describe this self-...

Tunable command layers for liquid crystal alignment.

A simple method for the construction of a stable, tunable, self-assembled command layer for liquid crystal display purposes is described. A pyridine-functionalized oligosiloxane spontaneously forms an anisotropic, grooved surface on indium-tin-oxide, enabling it to align liquid crystalline molecules. The pyridine functions act as seeds for the epitaxial growth of stacks of highly ordered zinc p...