Measurement of Molecular Optical Anisotropy of Nematogen by Depolarized Rayleigh Scattering

Abstract

The bulk birefringence of liquid crystals is thought to be determined by the molecular optical anisotropy and order parameters. However, the birefringence experimentally determined was smaller than that obtained by using calculated molecular optical anisotropies and experimentally determined order parameters. As a check on the reliability of the calculated optical anisotropies, in this work, we measured the depolarized Rayleigh scattering from nematogens in solution of COl_4 to determine the mean-squared optical anisotrpies, γ_2 These values are compared with those calculated.