Liquid crystals : oligomeric and polymeric materials for soft photonic technologies

The current pace of today's information technologies might lead to the casual observer to believe that this is all new. However the reality is that, as with most things, this is really a long evolution of processes based on tried, tested and re-adapted techniques. This thesis represents 12 years of predominantly technology driven research and covers a whole range of characterising, evaluating and fabricating devices based on liquid crystalline systems. Firstly polymer liquid crystals are discussed with respect to the fabrication of a flexible substrate display based on standard printing techniques and this is shown to have improved display viewing properties over a standard polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) device. Following on form this work is presented that involves the production of regular grid arrays in isotropic polymers that are used as control structures in nematic liquid crystal systems. This progresses onto a now patented device that allows the production of robust ferroelectric devices based on PDLC technology. Whilst the development of production techniques is important for the advancement of devices it would not be possible to keep up the pace without continued research into the basic liquid crystalline systems. The final chapter reviews work currently under supervision of the author based on flexoelectric effects in symmetric bimesogens. These materials possess responses times of the order of ~ 100ms with an effective optic axis switching angle that is linear with the applied field and can be in well in excess of 90°.