Polar liquid crystals – ferro, antiferro, banana, and columnar –

Thresholdless Switching in Ferro- and Antiferro-electric Liquid Crystal Displays

Acknowledgements First, I would like to express my gratitude to my promoter prof. K. Neyts, for giving me the privilege to conduct this PhD work under his supervision. Throughout this research, he provided me with continuous scientific help, valuable advice and lots of new ideas, which inspired and motivated my work. His great talent to explain things clearly and simply helped me to understand ...

Surface ferro (or antiferro) magnetism in bulk antiferro (or ferro) magnets : renormalization group analysis

2014 The renormalization group techniques are applied, for the first time, to surface magnetism in bulk magnets, for all signs of surface and bulk coupling constants. The q-state Potts model is specifically focused upon, and an interesting q-evolution of the phase diagram is exhibited. In particular the Ising model (q = 2) presents a remarkable feature in the case of competing bulk-and surface ...

Dielectric Investigations on Ferroelectric Columnar Liquid Crystals

Hydrodynamics of polar liquid crystals.

Starting from a microscopic definition of an alignment vector proportional to the polarization, we discuss the hydrodynamics of polar liquid crystals with local C infinity v symmetry. The free energy for polar liquid crystals differs from that of nematic liquid crystals (D infinity h) in that it contains terms violating the n --> -n symmetry. First we show that these Z2-odd terms induce a gener...

Separated local field spectroscopy of columnar and nematic liquid crystals.

We are in this work comparing the efficiencies of various 1H-13C separated local field (SLF) experiments when applied to columnar and nematic liquid crystals. In particular, the performances of the conventional SLF, proton-detected local field (PDLF), and polarization inversion spin exchange at the magic angle (PISEMA) methods in terms of spectral resolution, robustness, and ability to measure ...