Liquid Crystal Droplets

Droplets of liquid crystals are a relatively well studied system because of the ease of their preparation and the richness of phenomena which can be observed in them. The simplest way of preparing them is to mix a small amount of a LC with a medium which will not dissolve the LC, for example an organic-molecule-based liquid crystal with a polar solvent such as water. Droplets can also be formed with phase separation as in polymer-dispersed LC [1], or with microfluidics which gives substantial control over their sizes [2, 3]. Droplets of various LC phases have been studied so far: smectic [4, 5], columnar [6] and blue phases [7, 8, 9], but by far the most frequently studied are nematic and cholesteric droplets.