Thin smectic liquid crystal films with competing boundary conditions (planar and homeotropic at opposing surfaces) form well-known striated structures known as “oily streaks”, which are a series of hemicylindrical caps that run perpendicular to the easy axis of the planar substrate. The streaks vanish on heating into the nematic phase, where the film becomes uniform and exhibits hybrid alignmen...

We describe the preparation and electro-optic characteristics of a color display which makes use of the selective reflection of cholesteric droplets embedded in a polymer film. The polymer film is formed by a UV-curable adhesive, as opposed to the thermoplastic polymers which have been used previously. The new systems are easy to prepare and suitable for operation at room temperature. They show...

Graphene flakes with giant shape anisotropy are extensively used to establish connectedness electrical percolation in various heterogeneous systems. However, the percolation behaviour of graphene flakes has been recently predicted to be far more complicated than generally anticipated on the basis of excluded volume arguments. Here we confirm experimentally that graphene flakes self-assemble int...

Polymer-stabilized blue-phase liquid crystals hold great potential for future display applications. Some technical challenges, such as blue-phase temperature range, operation voltage, hysteresis, and voltage holding ratio remain to be overcome before widespread commercialization can be realized. In this paper, we review recent advances in this emerging technology.

The effects of droplet size on light scattering by polymer-dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) films have been studied theoretically and experimentally. Rayleigh-Gans calculations predict that, provided the droplets scatter independently, backscattering will be maximum at wavelength ,'l when the droplet radius is about /2/7. However, correlation effects become noticeable for droplet volume fraction...

In this paper we discuss the optical reflective properties of single and multidomain cholesteric liquid crystals both experimentally and theoretically. The multidomain system has been prepared by dispersing a low concentration of polymer in a cholesteric liquid crystal. This results in a (passive) bistable colorful reflective display. Here we discuss the role of the polymer in altering the refl...