The orientation behavior of liquid crystal molecules in stretched films of polymer-dispersed liquid crystals (PDLC) was investigated by means of infrared dichroism. The liquid crystal used is 4prime-octyl-4-biphenyl-carbonitrile (8CN); the polymer matrices are semicrystalline poly(epsilon-caprolactone) (PCL) and an amorphous miscible blend of PCL with poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC). 8CN was found to have a limit of solubility below 5 wt.% in PCL. We show that an uniaxial stretching can effectively induce a macroscopic orientation of 8CN, and that this orientation can be preserved in the films after removal of the extensional force at room temperature, where 8CN is in its liquid crystalline phase. The molecular orientation is obtained even by stretching PDLC films with 8CN in the liquid state. These results suggest that an elongated polymer cavity in stretched PDLC imposes LC director fields with respect to the long axes of the droplets, which are aligned parallel to the strain direction. The experiments also reveal that the orientation of 8CN is higher in stretched PDLC with a semicrystalline matrix (PCL) than with an amorphous matrix (the PCL-PVC blend), and that the sizes of the LC droplets also have a slight effect on the induced orientation. This work represents a first step in the exploration of new electrooptical effects of PDLC through the presence of a uniform orientation of the liquid crystal molecules and modifications of the polymer cavity at the electrical field-off state.Key words: polymer-dispersed liquid crystals, molecular orientation, infrared dichroism, electrooptical materials.
Determination of liquid crystal orientation in holographic polymer dispersed liquid crystals by linear and nonlinear optics