A solid-state broadband beam deflector is described. This non-mechanical system steers spatially coherent broad band light to a common location in the far field. The components include a liquid crystal grating and achromatic Fourier transformer. The liquid crystal grating employs a polarization modulation scheme which produces a wavelength independent phase shift. The achromatic Fourier transfo...

An electric-field method is developed for measuring the polar anchoring energy of vertically aligned nematic liquid-crystal cells. Both theoretical analyses and confirming experimental results are presented. Vertically aligned liquid-crystal cells with buffed polyimide alignment layers are used to investigate the measurement techniques. Based on the voltage-dependent transmittance of the liquid...

Liquid crystal micro-particles are functional materials possessing optical and dielectric anisotropies originating from the arrangement of rod-like molecules within the particles. Although they can be switched by an electric field, particles dispersed in isotropic hosts usually cannot return to their original state, because there is no restoration force acting on the particles. Here, we describ...

The dynamics of a thixotropic silica aerosil gel dispersed in an octylcyanobiphenyl liquid crystal were directly probed by x-ray intensity fluctuation spectroscopy. For all samples, the time-autocorrelation function of the gel was well described by a modified-exponential function over the q range studied. Compared to a pure gel sample, a dilute (0.06 g cm(-3)) gel embedded within the liquid cry...

Articles you may be interested in Dynamic response of a polymer-stabilized blue-phase liquid crystal Electro-optics of polymer-stabilized blue phase liquid crystal displays Appl. Reversible optical control of transmittance in polymer/liquid crystal composite films by photoinduced phase transition J. Polymer-stabilized blue-phase liquid crystal (BPLC) comprising fluorinated compounds with high r...

A mean field theory is presented to describe cholesteric phases in mixtures of a polymer and a cholesteric liquid crystal. Taking into account an anisotropic coupling between a polymer and a liquid crystal, we examine the helical pitch, twist elastic constant, and phase separations. Analytical expressions of the helical pitch of a cholesteric phase and the twist elastic constant are derived as ...

Reflective twisted nematic liquid crystal displays consisting of just one input polarizer, a liquid crystal cell, and a rear reflector are discussed. We first show that all such display modes reported in the literature can be depicted systematically in a series of parameter space diagrams. Then by making use of such diagrams as a guide, we show that other new high quality reflective display mod...

For a model known to exhibit liquid–liquid transitions, we examine how varying the bond orientational flexibility affects the stability of the liquid–liquid transition relative to that of the crystal phases. For very rigidly oriented bonds, the crystal is favored over all amorphous phase transitions. We find that increasing the bond flexibility decreases both the critical temperature Tc for liq...

Cell gap thickness is one of the most important design parameters for liquid crystal displays ~LCD!. Existing measurement methods only apply to transmittive LC cells. These methods are obviously unsuitable for measuring the cell gaps of reflective LCDs with internal reflectors. This kind of LCD includes single polarizer reflective displays and liquid crystal on silicon displays. The objective o...