The polymer stabilized liquid crystal (PSLC) film is a relatively novel electro-optical material, which is generally obtained by dissolving a small amount of a bifunctional photoreactive monomer in a low molecular mass liquid crystal. In this paper, the PSLC films were prepared with photoreactive biphenyl methacrylate monomers by photopolymerization induced phase separation. The effects of liqu...

We report the fabrication and the optical characterization of a hybrid tunable integrated optical filter. It consists of a diffused ion-exchanged channel waveguide on a borosilicate glass substrate with a cover of the same glass to form a gap filled with a holographic grating. The grating morphology, called POLICRYPS (POlymer LIquid CRYstal Polymer Slices), is made of alternating stripes of pol...

LLE Review, Volume 74 139 The last 20 years have seen a growth of mixed-media systems in which cholesteric liquid crystals (CLC’s) are one component. These include polymer-dispersed CLC’s1 in which the CLC’s are confined to microdroplets within a continuous isotropic polymer and CLC’s in gels2 in which there is a small amount of polymer to stabilize the CLC structure. In either case, the contin...

The surface-induced structure formation of polymer-dispersed liquid crystals (PDLCs) on a chemically patterned substrate was studied for the first time. The patterns on the substrate were successfully transferred to the PDLC film, resulting in alternating LC-rich and polymer-rich phases. This simple approach offers a new means of organizing micrometer-sized LC domains into well-ordered structur...

The authors describe a method to produce gold nanoparticle-dispersed liquid crystals by means of sputtering, and discuss how the presence of gold nanoparticles affect the electro-optic response of the host liquid crystal. The method exploits the fact that liquid crystals possess low vapor pressures which allow them to undergo the sputtering process, and the target material is sputtered directly...