Simultaneous Observations of Textural Characterisation and Birefringence in Liquid Crystals

Abstract

The authors made an attempt to combine the characterization and one of the physical property measurements simultaneously to avoid this environment change while the measurements are made. Here, the authors presents the details of the setup fabricated indigenously to observe the textures (microscopy) and the measure of birefringence simultaneously in liquid crystals. The advantages of such an experimental setup are, a physical property can be measured (birefringence) along with the characterization of the sample, thereby reducing time spent for individual measurements, identical environment can be created for the sample for both the measurements and the manifestation of different liquid crystalline phases as well as the birefringence change at the phase interface can be visually observed which paves the way for finding out the fluctuation dominated non-linear regions (FDNLR) on both sides of the inter face.

Keywords:

• birefringence
• FDNLR
• identical environment
• simultaneous observation

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Management, and the Principal of The Hindu College, Machilipatnam, for providing facilities to carry out the measurements. One of the authors Dr. P. V. Datta Prasad expresses his gratitude to DST, India for providing travel grant to attend the 22 ILCC at Jeju, South Korea from June 29th to July 4th 2008 where this paper has been presented.

Notes

^#The peaks are not resolved in 10O.1 compound.

*The scan rate is 1°C/minute (otherwise 10°C/minute) to resolve the I-N and N-A transitions in 10O.1 compound.