Alignment control of molecules for molecular materials and the liquid crystals

Towards the fabrication of diverse polymer film devices

Abstract

It is surely required to develop a novel technology for the alignment control of molecular materials in order to utilize their anisotropic properties. In particular, this makes a important sense for liquid crystals and thus, it seems that the difficulty of the alignment control have given a certain disadvantage to the reserach and development for the application. The more highly viscous and ordered mesophases such as liquid crystalline semiconductors needs a novel and trustful technique for the alignment control, while the less viscous and ordered ones have been utilized successfully to the practical applications by the sustrate surface modification as well as the external fields. In this talk, a possible technique for the molecular alignment control of the highly ordered liquid crystals, polarized infrared technique, is shown and the recent results indicate this may lead to a novel fabrication technology for the diverse polymer-based devices.