Abstract
Liquid crystals were discovered by Friedrich Reinitzer in 1888 when he observed colors in cholesterol derivatives that are characteristic of highly birefringent materials [...]
Highlights
Materials that today are classified as “liquid crystals” are typically composed of organic molecules and have phase structures that are between liquid and crystalline [2]
Much of the work during the subsequent two decades involved understanding the transitions among the myriad liquid crystalline phases [7], especially in light of renormalization group theory and behavior in less-than-three-dimensions
Similar to a child’s frame to make soap bubbles, it was discovered that the smectic phase of liquid crystals could form free-standing films [8] as thin as a single molecular layer across centimeter-sized frames, whose dimension ratio is comparable to a piece of paper stretched across a football pitch, either international football or American football, as the dimensions of both playing fields are of the same order
Summary
Materials that today are classified as “liquid crystals” are typically composed of organic molecules and have phase structures that are between liquid and crystalline [2]. The simplest liquid crystal phase, the “nematic”, is composed of highly prolate or oblate organic molecules (or other anisometric structures) that possess long-range orientational order, but no long-range positional order.
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