The synthesis of H-bonded bent-core side-chain liquid crystal polymers carried out by two alternative synthetic routes and their properties are reported.

A light-driven nanoscale chiral molecular switch was found to impart its chirality to an achiral liquid crystal host to form a self-organized, optically tunable helical superstructure capable of fast and reversible phototuning of the structural reflection across the entire visible region.

Equilibria of a nematic liquid crystal confined between two eccentric cylinders are studied within a purely director approach. A planar equilibrium configuration competes against a three-dimensional one. A stability diagram is obtained in terms of both the ratio between the radii of the bounding cylinders and the distance between their axes. It turns out that the nonplanar minimizer has a struc...

Stefan H. J. Idziak,1 Ilya Koltover,1 Jacob N. Israelachvili,2 and Cyrus R. Safinya1 1Materials Department, Materials Research Laboratory, Physics Department, and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Program, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106 2Department of Chemical Engineering, Materials Department, and Materials Research Laboratory, University of California, Santa Barbar...

In this paper, we propose a new method of optically implementing digital logic gates capable of performing all logic operations and give the technique for construction of an array of n-bit parallel adders as a typical application circuit. These gates are implemented using a Hughes liquid crystal light valve operated in the parallel off-state configuration. It is found that all possible function...

We investigate interactions between spatial nonlocal bright solitons in nematic liquid crystals using an analytical ("effective particle") approach as well as direct numerical simulations. The model predicts attraction of out-of-phase solitons and the existence of their stable bound state. This nontrivial property is solely due to the nonlocal nature of the nonlinear response of the liquid crys...

The temperature dependence of the thickness of thick free-standing films is studied using a high-resolution film thickness measurement technique. A small discontinuity in the temperature dependence of the smectic layer thickness at every phase transition between ferro-, ferri-, and antiferroelectric phases is observed. We show that the major contribution to it arises from a change in the smecti...