Stress field visualization birefringence

Fig. 1. Stress field visualization through birefringence (From Ref. 2).

One application of birefringence related to polymer rheology is stress field visualization. It relies on flow-induced birefringence techniques to examine the spatial and temporal evolutions of stress in a polymer melt (see Fig. 9) (55). In this... 

At the same time, to our surprise, P8 M appears visually transparent and nonbirefringent, both in bulk samples and in thin films. This is illustrated by Figure 5.3, where the spot of chiral polymer can hardly be recognized between two glasses in contrast to its racemic isomer, P8 M. We should stress here that it is impossible to induce any birefringence in P8 M using shear flow, electric field up to 15 V/pm, or magnetic field up to 2.5 T. 

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