Dynamic chiral nematics

Fenchenko studied free induction decays and transverse relaxation in entangled polymer melts. He considered both the effects of the dipolar interactions between spins in different polymer chains and within an isolated segment along s single chain. Sebastiao and co-workers presented a unifying model for molecular dynamics and NMR relaxation for chiral and non-chiral nematic liquid crystals. The model included molecular rotations/ reorientations, translational self-diffusion as well as collective motions. For the chiral nematic phase, an additional relaxation mechanism was proposed, associated with rotations induced by translational diffusion along the helical axis. The model was applied to interpret experimental data, to which we return below. 

In this section studies of dynamics at the molecular level as revealed by relaxation measurements and diffusion studies as well as the behaviour of the phase as revealed by the dynamics of the director are reported. A proton NMR relaxaometry study of the molecular dynamics in two liquid crystalline systems, namely, 4 -n-pentyl-4-cyanobiphenyl (5CB) and (S)-4 -(3-methylpenyl)-4-cyanobiphenyl (5CB ) and their mixture has been reported.The spin-lattice relaxation time has been measured as a function of temperature and Larmor frequency in the isotropic, nematic, chiral nematic, and smectic A phases of these liquid crystalline systems. The data have been analysed in terms of local and collective molecular motions. 

Light valves were first produced on the basis of the classical semiconductors, ZnS, CdS, ZnSe, CdTe, and GaAs, in contact with nematic or chiral nematic liquid crystal [18]. The basic effects in liquid crystals included electrically controlled birefringence, dynamic scattering, and the cholesteric-nematic phase transition with the frequency response limited to a few Hertz. 

The static theory discussed in the previous section describes the equilibrium situation in chiral nematics very well - in general, theory and experiment are in good accord. The dynamic situation is less clear. On the molecular scale, the chiral nematic and nematic phases are identical the question then becomes, how does the macroscopic twist or helicity modify the vector stress tensor of the achiral nematic phase defined by the so-called [109] Leslie friction coefficients a -a T Experimentally, viscosity coefficients that are then related to the Leslie coefficients are measured in a way that depends specifically on the experiment being used to determine them. The starting point for discussion of dynamic properties is to use classical mechanics to describe the time dependencies of the director field n (r, t), the velocity field v (r, t), and their interdependency. Excellent reviews of this, for achiral nematics, are to be found in [59,109,... 

As discussed in Sec. 2.2.2.1, the foundations of the continuum model were laid by Oseen [61] and Zocher [107] some seventy years ago, and this model was reexamined by Frank [65], who introduced the concept of curvature elasticity to describe the equilibrium free energy. This theory is used, to this day, to determine splay, twist, and bend distortions in nematic materials. The dynamic models or how the director field behaves in changing from one equilibrium state to another have taken much longer to evolve. This is primarily due to the interdependency of the director it (r, t) and v (r, /) fields, which in the case of chiral nematics is made much more complex due to the long-range, spiraling structural correlations. The most widely used dynamic theory for chiral... 

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