cholesteric liquid crystals

Structural Features of Statistically Rotationally Invariant Mosaic Birefringent Layers That Show Circular Dichroism

Background and Objectives: Nonabsorbing cholesteric liquid crystalline layers with a fine-domain random planar structure and with the cholesteric pitch being much larger than the wavelength of the incident light have been recently demonstrated to exhibit electricallyinduced circular dichroism due to scattering. Experimental conditions under which this effect was observed allow consideration of a problem of scattering of light on such a liquid-crystalline layer as a problem of diffraction of a light beam on a mosaic of chiral domains with different azimuthal orientation.