Liquid Crystals in the Nineties and Beyond

This book is a collection of 13 articles, written by experts, on different aspects of the physics and applications of liquid crystals. In addition to giving self-contained review articles with good bibliography, the authors have discussed the anticipated or highly important and desirable breakthroughs in the near future in their respective fields. The book should provide readers with a good starting point, insight, and an indicator of what current important problems are. Good researchers should benefit in fine tuning their efforts to test the ideas put forward by the authors. Contents:Anisotropy of the Nematic-Smectic A Phase Transition (B S Andereck)Thermal Investigations of Phase Transitions in Thermotropic Liquid Crystals (J Thoen)Numerical Studies of Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena in Liquid Crystals (C Dasgupta)High-Resolution Calorimetric Studies at Phase Transitions of Alkylcyanobiphenyl Liquid Crystals Confined to Submicron Size Cylindrical Cavities (D Finotello & G S Iannacchione)Physical Properties of Thin Substrate-Free Liquid-Crystal Films (T Stoebe & C C Huang)Ferroelectric Liquid Crystals: From the Plane Wave to the Multisoliton Limit (I Muševic et al.)The Optical Properties of Chiral Liquid Crystals (K A Suresh)Patterns in Thin Liquid Crystal Films and the Divergence (“Surfacelike”) Elasticity (O D Lavrentovich & V M Pergamenshchik)Liquid Crystal Defects in a Magnetic Field (G S Ranganath)Saddle-Splay Elasticity in Nematic Liquid Crystals (G P Crawford & Zumer)Rheology and Rheo-Optics of Polymer Liquid Crystals (M Srinivasarao)Recent Advances and Future Directions of NMR Spectroscopy of Molecules Oriented in Liquid Crystals (C L Khetrapal)Improvement of the Viewing Angle for Display Devices with Grey Scale (P J Bos) Readership: Physicists and chemists active in the field of liquid crystals. keywords: “The collection of papers provides a comprehensive review for experimentalists and theoreticians who are interested in the latest developments in the field of thermotropic liquid crystals.” Zeitschrift für Kristallographie