A series of liquid crystals have been synthesized and studied based upon mononuclear orthoplatinated rod-like heteroaromatic and 1,3-diketonate ligands. The liquid crystalline properties of these molecules were investigated using polarized light optical microscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, single crystal X-ray diffraction, and powder X-ray diffraction. Increasing the number of alkyl c...

We carried out a search for companions to B stars using the adaptive optics system of the Advanced ElectroOptical System 3.6 m telescope. We observed 70 B stars in the I band, finding 16 companions, 10 of which are newly discovered companions. For each system with a detected companion we give its measured astrometry and differential magnitude. We then put the observation in context of the syste...

Photo-aligned ferroelectric liquid crystal (FLC) display reveals a perfect alignment in case of asymmetric boundary conditions, when the competition in aligning action of two solid surfaces is avoided. In this case a stable uniform photo-alignment on one of the cell substrates spreads out to the other, which is prepared to sustain planar alignment with a degenerate azimuthal direction. In the p...

The temperature dependence of the rotational viscosities of several physically markedly different binary mixtures belonging to ten different liquid crystal classes is measured. An attempt is made to correlate the results with class-specific structural properties such as hydrogenated rings, molecular polarity and structure of flexible side-chains. It is show that the measured smallscale dynamic ...

Optical transmission spectrum measurements in an electric field are used to study the short-range structure of the blue phase III (BPIII). The data are compared with the theoretical models for BPIII. Our results can be explained by the models in which BPIII has the simple-cubic local structure or cubic bond orientational order.

A polarizer-free flexible and reflective electro-optical switch using dye-doped liquid crystal (LC) gels is demonstrated. The electro-optical performances of both scattering and absorption based dye-doped LC gels depend on curing temperatures due to domain sizes of polymer networks. Such flexible electro-optical switch is bendable and trim-able because of the vertical polymer networks and gel-l...