Université de Fribourg

Viscoelasticity of nematic liquid crystals at a glance

Giavazzi, Fabio ; Crotti, Stefano ; Speciale, Antonio ; Serra, Francesca ; Zanchetta, Giuliano ; Trappe, Véronique ; Buscaglia, Marco ; Bellini, Tommaso ; Cerbino, Roberto

In: Soft Matter, 2014, vol. 10, no. 22, p. 3938–3949

Polarised microscopy is shown to be a powerful alternative to light scattering for the determination of the viscoelasticity of aligned nematic liquid crystals. We perform experiments in a wide range of temperatures by using an adapted version of the recently introduced differential dynamic microscopy technique, which enables us to extract scattering information directly from the microscope...