Damped curvature oscillations are excited at the surface between a nematic liquid crystal and a solid substrate, from the linear coupling of an AC electric field with the flexoelectric properties of the medium. The waves are detected by a modulation ellipsometry technique. Linear-in-field oscillations of the director in the surface nematic layer have been observed. The amplitude and characteris...

We investigated the flexoelectric effect of a fringe field switching liquid crystal (LC) cell and characterised the resultant image flicker with different LC mixtures at different frame rates. Incorporating with human eye perception of 10 observers, we found that LC mixtures with a dielectric anisotropy smaller than ~7 lead to unnoticeable image flicker at 60 frames per second. The obtained fli...

Bi2Te3-based alloys have been intensively used for thermoelectric coolers and generators due to their high Seebeck coefficient S. So far, efforts to improve the S have been made mostly on changing the structures and components. Herein, we demonstrate an anomalous thermoelectricity in strained Bi2Te3 films, i.e., the value of S is obviously changed after reversing the direction of temperature gr...

Both flexoelectricity and piezoelectricity belong to the electromechanical coupling effect. While only exists in materials whose crystal structure is noncentrosymmetric a pre-polarization process necessary for ferroelectric piezoelectric ceramics, theoretically all dielectric does not require pre-polarization. However, this mean that would be affected by process, considering polarization phenom...

Through mapping of the spatiotemporal strain profile in ferroelectric BiFeO3 epitaxial thin films, we report an optically initiated dynamic enhancement of the strain gradient of 10(5)-10(6) m(-1) that lasts up to a few ns depending on the film thickness. Correlating with transient optical absorption measurements, the enhancement of the strain gradient is attributed to a piezoelectric effect dri...

A macroscopic model is developed for analyzing the electro-optics of short-pitch uniform lying helix (ULH) cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs). Both flexoelectric effect and dielectric effect make important contributions to the maximum transmittance and operation voltage of the ULH devices. Based on the proposed macroscopic approximation, we derive an analytical expression to quantitatively eval...

We report results of the splay (K_{11}) and bend (K_{33}) elastic constants and the effective flexoelectric coefficient of three bent-core liquid crystals belonging to a homologous series of 4-cyanoresorcinol bisbenzoates with varying chain lengths. Based on the results of x-ray scattering studies, one of the three compounds with a shorter chain length (C4) has few, if any, clusters present in ...