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The influence of fringe electric field applied during photopolymerization on the electro-optic properties of polymer-stabilized blue phase liquid crystals (PS-BPLCs) was investigated. It has been found that the thermal stability would not degrade if the electric field was less than a critical value. The contrast ratio of PS-BPLC can be improved significantly because the uniformity of blue phase liquid crystal domain was enhanced by the electric fields, which were applied during photopolymerization. Meanwhile, with the electric filed, the potential energy of the BPLC molecules may lower the anchoring energy of the polymer network resulting in the improvement of electro-optic response properties. With optimized electric field during polymerization, the contrast ratio and the Kerr constant of PS-BPLC can be improved by 4.1 times and 15%, respectively, and the hysteresis can be decreased by 10%, while the response time and residual birefringence have no degradation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated random lasing from a fluid self-assembly sphere-phase liquid crystal, which was composed of three-dimensional twist sphere structures with disclinations among them. The threshold energy of the random lasing from sphere-phase liquid crystal was 32% of that from the chiral nematic phase because of the interference associated with multiple scattering by randomly distributed sphere-phase platelets. Such random lasers composed of self-assembly soft organic materials may be useful for holographic displays, point-of-care biomedical analysis, and optical security coatings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]