Dynamic electric polarization of nematic liquid crystals subjected to a shear flow

Abstract

The effect of coupling between the dipole moment and the orientation is explored based on a relaxation equation for the second rank alignment tensor characterizing the molecular order in liquid crystals and a corresponding equation for the electric polarization. The orientational dynamics leads to a time dependence of the electric polarization. We propose a possibility to measure these effects via the resulting magnetic fields of the magnitude |B| approximately equal to 10(-9)T . Furthermore, the presence of the electric polarization modifies the orientational dynamics as demonstrated in solution phase diagrams.