Abstract
Achieving tunable physical properties is currently one of the most exciting research topics. In order to realize this goal, a medium that is responsive to external stimuli and can undergo a change in its physical property is required. Liquid crystal (LC) is a prominent candidate, as its physical and optical properties can be easily manipulated with various stimuli, such as surface anchoring, rubbing, geometric confinement, and external fields. Having broken away from the past devotion to obtaining a uniform domain of LCs, people are now putting significant efforts toward forming and manipulating ordered and oriented defect structures with a unique arrangement within. The complicated molecular order with tunability would benefit the interdisciplinary research fields of optics, physics, photonics, and materials science. In this review, the recent progress toward defect engineering in the nematic and smectic phases by controlling the surface environment and electric field and their combinational methods is introduced. We close the review with a discussion of the possible applications enabled using LC defect structures as switchable materials.
Highlights
This research proves the importance of the combinational contribution of the surface treatment, pillars, and electric field because it would not be possible to obtain the tunable periodic pillars, the Liquid crystal (LC) defects are organized with periodicity over a large area
The fabricated highly ordered LC defect patterns can find their value in some research areas, including particle highly ordered LC defect patterns can find their value in some research areas, including particle manipulation and electro-optic devices
The defect arrays consisting of periodic −1 defects, illustrated in Figure 9, show an ability a vortex beam when illuminated with circularly polarized light (CPL) (Figure 15a,b) [80,81,82]
Summary
Passing through the golden age of the liquid crystal display (LCD) industry, nanotechnology based on liquid crystals (LCs) started gradually fading away from the prime line in industries once organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and quantum dot technology appeared in display applications. Useful only when formed on a large scale with order and controlled with stimuli such as temperature, light, or external fields. The rubbing, requirement can be confinement, fulfilled by accompanying techniques, structures under control can rubbing, be furthergeometric manipulated with post-treatments above including surface treatment, confinement, and external using fields.the. Incontributions this review as paper, studies on defect engineering in the last decade, exploiting surface larger a tunable medium. Review paper, studies on defect engineering in the decade, exploiting surface treatment, useful applications based on the LC defect structures as a switching medium rubbing, geometric confinement, electric fields, and combinational stimuli, are introduced. As theapplications review focuses onon thethe effect of the structures defect engineering techniques, research following section, useful based. Most conventional liquid crystalline phases, nematic (N), and smectic (SmA) phases, will be discussed
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