Viscoelastic modes in chiral liquid crystals

Abstract

Viscoelastic properties of liquid crystals are very important for applications like display technology. However, there are not many direct techniques to study them. In this review, we describe our studies on the viscoelastic modes of some chiral liquid crystals using dynamic light scattering. We discuss viscoelastic modes corresponding to the C director fluctuations in the chiral smectic C phase and the behaviour of the Goldstone-mode near the chiral smectic C–smectic A phase transition. In cholesteric liquid crystals, we consider the director fluctuations in a wavevector range comparable to the inverse pitch of the cholesteric. Here, the study of the scattered light in the vicinity of the Bragg reflection using a novel geometry will be presented.