FLC Materials

Heteroatom liquid crystals

In a quest to discover liquid crystal materials with new properties, our chemists are experimenting with novel heteroatom mesogens. They have discovered an entirely new class of liquid crystal materials containing germanium.
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Analog FLC materials

Although the standard FLC mode is binary, recent work has shown that FLCs with high spontaneous polarization naturally operate in an analog mode. We've has developed materials with 90° optic-axis switching that give hysteresis-free analog modulation under charge-control drive.
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Bananas

The ideal liquid-crystal optical phase modulator would have retardance variation without optic-axis orientation change, a difficult mode to achieve in ferroelectric liquid crystals. Our scientists, in a collaboration with the Univ. of Colo., have developed new bent-core FLC materials with the SmCAPF phase, though, that do just that.
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NLO: FLC materials for nonlinear optics

The polar symmetry of the smectic C* phase provides a mechanism fundamentally different from that of poled to produce χ2 optical nonlinearity in polymers. But how to align chromophores perpendicular to the liquid-crystal director?
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