Brewster (1830a) points out that beautiful color effects will be seen if metallic salts are allowed to crystallize from solution under a microscope in polarized light. For this he recommends a glass-plate polarizer and a thin plate of agate or tourmaline as analyzer. The first one to equip a microscope with Nicol prisms was probably Talbot (1834a, 1837) who describes various observations with t...

1. Lyotropic behavior of C12OazoE3OH: Pure amphiphiles with rigid segments like azobenzenes with a similar non-ionic head are able to form stable bilayers1. An aliquot of C12OazoE3OH (19 mM, in chloroform) was placed onto non-treated glass and evaporation the solvent at room temperature was allowed. Polarized optical microscopy (POM) observation through crossed polarizers revealed the smectic C...

We review approaches for simultaneous imaging of three-dimensional director structures and component distributions in composite materials using fluorescence confocal polarizing microscopy. To study dynamic processes in these systems, we use the Nipkow-disk microscope in which the confocal images are obtained within milliseconds. The visualized director fields, free-standing film profiles, and o...

We present Monte Carlo computer simulations of model nematic droplets that mimic polymer dispersed liquid crystals (PDLC’s) with bipolar boundary conditions. We investigate the orientational order and the molecular organization in these systems for various anchoring strengths and for external applied fields of different magnitude both for positive and negative susceptivity anisotropy. We report...

A standard wide field inverted microscope was converted to a spatially selective spectrally resolved microscope through the addition of a polarizing beam splitter, a pair of polarizers, an amplitude-mode liquid crystal-spatial light modulator, and a USB spectrometer. The instrument is capable of simultaneously imaging and acquiring spectra over user defined regions of interest. The microscope c...

To test the "traction fiber" model for metaphase positioning of bivalents during meiosis, kinetochore fibers of maloriented bivalents, induced during recovery from cold arrest, were analyzed with a liquid crystal polarizing microscope. The measured birefringence retardation of kinetochore fibers is proportional to the number of microtubules in a fiber. Five of the 11 maloriented bivalents analy...

OBJECTIVES Periapical lesions, including periapical cyst (PC), periapical granuloma (PG), and periapical abscess (PA), are frequently affected by chemical/physical damage during root canal treatment or severe bacterial infection, and thus, the differential diagnosis of periapical lesions may be difficult due to the presence of severe inflammatory reaction. The aim of this study was to make diff...