Parametric Investigation of Liquid Crystal Mixtures: Experiments with Liquid Crystal-Polymer Composite System

While much fundamental research is still performed with pure liquid crystals,industrial applications employ mostly mixtures,composites,or specially doped liquid crystals with tailor-made physical and optical properties.Current progress and large scale application of liquid crystals in optical technology are largely the result of tremendous advances in such new material development efforts.Liquid crystal mixtures formed by different concentrations of the same set of constituents should be regarded as physically and optically different materials.The book contains the experimental work carried on the composite system formed using cholesteric liquid crystal[Cholesteryl Pelargonate-(CP)],polymer[Poly Methyl Methacrylate(PMMA)] and azobenzene(orange) dye.The parameters that are investigated are the textures,the phase transition temperatures,the absorption in the visible range and infrared absorption.The parameters were investigated for(i)the pure CP,(ii)the composite system formed using CP and PMMA and (iii) for the composite system formed using CP,PMMA and azobenzene dye.