We report a technique to measure the mid-infrared photothermal response induced by a tunable quantum cascade laser in the neat liquid crystal 4-octyl-4'-cyanobiphenyl (8CB), without any intercalated dye. Heterodyne detection using a Ti:sapphire laser of the response in the solid, smectic, nematic and isotropic liquid crystal phases allows direct detection of a weak mid-infrared normal mode abso...

Beamsteering using liquid crystals can be achieved with refractive or diffractive implementations. The common thread in these various structures is that the liquid crystal is employed as an optical phase modulator. Either nematic or smectic liquid crystal phases can be used to shift the phase of light and steer an optical beam. Various liquid crystal optical phase modulating schemes will be des...

The performance of a photonic band-edge laser fabricated from a low molar mass dye-doped chiral nematic liquid crystal is found to have a strong thermal dependence. At each temperature the performance of the laser has been characterized by the slope efficiency which was calculated from a plot of the emission energy as a function of excitation energy. This slope efficiency was found to increase ...

In this paper, we establish a blow up criterion for the short time classical solution of the nematic liquid crystal flow, a simplified version of Ericksen-Leslie system modeling the hydrodynamic evolution of nematic liquid crystals, in dimensions two and three. More precisely, 0 < T∗ < +∞ is the maximal time interval iff (i) for n = 3, |ω|+|∇d|2 / ∈ Lt L ∞ x (R × [0, T∗]); and (ii) for n = 2, |...

Anisotropic phase separation has been used to fabricate an electrically switchable microlens array from nematic liquid crystals. Nematic liquid-crystal-based microlens arrays have been built with diameters of approximately 400 microm and natural focal lengths as small as 1.6 mm. The focal length of each microlens in the array can be changed in milliseconds by an applied electric field. These de...

A bistable twisted nematic liquid crystal display based on dual frequency driving electronics has been demonstrated. By using special combinations of alignment layers and liquid crystals, bistability can be achieved readily with cell gaps as large as 5μm.

We demonstrated a continuous viewing angle controllable liquid crystal display (LCD) adopting a thermally variable retardation layer (TVRL) using nematic liquid crystal with transparent electric-heating lines to control temperature. The simulated and experimental results of the proposed LCD show continuous and symmetric viewing angle characteristics by tuning the retardation of TVRL using Joule...

The dynamics of two nematic liquid crystals, 4-(trans-4(')-n-octylcyclohexyl)isothiocyanatobenzene and 4-(4-pentyl-cyclohexyl)-benzonitrile, are investigated as a function of temperature both in the homeotropically aligned nematic phase and in the isotropic phase using optical heterodyne-detected optical Kerr effect experiments, which measures the time derivative of the polarizability-polarizab...

A new point-diffraction interferometer has been developed with a liquid-crystal filter that permits arbitrary phase shifts to be introduced between the object and reference beams. A microsphere embedded within the liquid-crystal layer provides a locally generated reference beam. We phase shift the object beam by varying a voltage across the liquid crystals, thereby altering the refractive index...

High-definition patterns were observed under 10-Hz-pulse-repetition-rate, nanosecond laser irradiation of azodye-doped planar-nematic liquid crystal layers at incident intensities I 5–10 MW=cm in a single beam configuration and without any feedback involved. An incident polarization parallel to the nematic director was used. Under periodic pulsed laser irradiation, far-field beam patterns at th...