Vertically stacked soliton-like domain walls in nematic liquid crystals

Jones, R., Melnyk, O., Macedo, R. and Camley, R. E. (2021) Vertically stacked soliton-like domain walls in nematic liquid crystals. Advanced Theory and Simulations, 4(11), 2100252. (doi: 10.1002/adts.202100252)

Abstract

In the standard liquid crystal (LC) geometry, one generally finds a quasi-parabolic director profile in the vertical direction, where the directors are aligned with an applied field in the center of the cell. In contrast, using a numerical energy minimization approach, we find that there are multiple metastable solutions where the director profile is oscillatory. At low voltages, we find small oscillations, which evolve into standard soliton-like domain walls as the applied voltage is increased. We predict the thickness of the domain wall with a simple analytic model that gives a good comparison to our numerical calculations, in the standard domain wall regime. For dual-frequency nematic LCs, the occurrence of this regime can be tuned by a change of the biasing frequency. Moreover, we investigate how domain walls can affect the optical properties of LC-based devices. For instance, we find that the transmittance curve shifts to higher voltages as domain walls are introduced. This shift can be used to create an efficient tunable filter.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: This work was supported by the UCCS BioFrontiers Center, University of Colorado Colorado Springs.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Macedo, Dr Rair
• Authors: Jones, R., Melnyk, O., Macedo, R., and Camley, R. E.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Engineering > Electronics and Nanoscale Engineering
• Journal Name: Advanced Theory and Simulations
• Publisher: Wiley
• ISSN: 2513-0390
• ISSN (Online): 2513-0390
• Published Online: 04 October 2021
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2021 Wiley-VCH GmbH
• First Published: First published in Advanced Theory and Simulations 4(11): 2100252
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the publisher copyright policy