The Gay-Berne (GB) potential has proved highly successful in the simulation of liquid crystal phases, although it is fairly demanding in terms of resources for simulations of large (e.g., N>10(5)) systems, as increasingly required in applications. Here, we introduce a soft-core GB model, which exhibits both liquid crystal phase behavior and rapid equilibration. We show that the Hamiltonian repl...

We demonstrate a high-speed inline holographic Stokesmeter that consists of two liquid crystal retarders and a spectrally selective holographic grating. Explicit choices of angles of orientation for the components in the inline architecture are identified to yield higher measurement accuracy than the classical architecture. We show polarimetric images of an artificial scene produced by such a S...

As described in the previous chapter, the nematic (N) liquid crystal is characterised by a long range orientational order of the long axes of the molecules without a long range positional order of their centres of mass (see section 1.2.1, chapter-1). The preferred axis of orientation in the nematic liquid crystal, called the director, is represented by the unit vector n ^ . The extent of orient...

The change in the orientation of nematic liquid crystals due to the increase of the sample thickness is experimentally analysed. The data show that the phenomenon is a critical

The effect of director pretilt on the twist magnetic Fréedericksz transition of nematics was investigated in a planar cell. The director configuration was calculated as a function of magnetic inductance. The dielectric and optical response of the nematic liquid crystal was numerically modeled. A dielectric measurement method for determining the elastic constant K_{22} is presented. The influenc...

We report the measurements of the temperature variations of the flexoelastic coefficient (e(*)/K) of a host calamitic liquid crystal (RO) and its mixture with two guest bent-core (BC-120 and BC-60) liquid crystals. The bent-core (BC) molecules have different core structures and bend angles; namely, θ=/~120° and =/~60°, respectively. We find that e(*)/K is independent of temperature and decrease...

Chiral segregation of enantiomers or chiral conformers of achiral molecules during self-assembly in well-ordered crystalline superstructures has fascinated chemists since Pasteur. Here we report spontaneous mirror-symmetry breaking in cubic phases formed by achiral multichain-terminated diphenyl-2,2'-bithiophenes. It was found that stochastic symmetry breaking is a general phenomenon observed i...

A high ambient-contrast-ratio (A-CR) and large aperture-ratio display is conceptually demonstrated and experimentally validated by stacking a normally black reflective liquid crystal display (NB-RLCD) and an organic light-emitting device (OLED). Such a tandem device can be switched between the NB-RLCD mode and the OLED mode under bright and dark ambient light, respectively. The normally black c...