No abstract

Cholesteric liquid crystals with long pitch confined in homeotropic cells can be used to generate stable but distorted and localized liquid crystal structures exhibiting spherulitic textures, known as “bubbles.” As these bubbles can be induced by an external electric field with a narrow range following the confinement ratio C=d/p ≈1 (d representing cell thickness and p representing cholesteric pitch), it is possible to obtain electrically controlled micro-lenses. Here we investigated the optical and electro-optical properties of such liquid crystal bubbles for creating an array of micro-lenses with electrically tunable focal length.

In a highly frustrated calamitic nematic phase, the strain can be relaxed by lowering the nematic order: the starting uniaxial symmetry can be broken and it can be replaced locally with transient biaxial domains. Using simple optical retardation measurements, we estimate the length scale over which the biaxial disturbance decays in space within a π-cell submitted to a weak electric field. We also characterise the transition cascade from the uniaxial splay texture to a bend texture through slow defect motion.