Chromic Phenomena: Technological Applications of Colour Chemistry
Providing an entry point both for new researchers and for established ones, this book develops and investigates new applications for color chemistry.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Chromic Phenomena: Technological Applications of Colour Chemistry
Chapter 5: Phenomena Involving the Manipulation of Light
5.1 Introduction
This last chapter covers those phenomena that use materials to manipulate light in a variety of ways in order to produce useful effects. In some of these phenomena light is manipulated by particular orientations of molecular materials to produce a visual effect, as in liquid crystal displays. In others, light produces colour by physical interactions with materials, as in lustre and optically variable pigments and in holography. Molecular materials are also used to increase the intensity of light, as in lasers, or to modify the transmission of light through materials by electrical means, as in opto-electronics or by all optical systems, as in photonics. Whilst the volume markets currently are in liquid crystals, lasers and lustre pigments, the ultimate commercial application goal for many of these phenomena is optical data storage and transmission devices and in all optical computers.
5.2 Liquid Crystals
Liquid crystals displays have become such an integral part of our daily life that it is a sobering thought that the first men to go to the moon in the 1960s would have never seen a watch with a digital display made from liquid crystals. The all-pervasive commercialisation of the technology since the advent in the 1970s of the first really useful liquid crystal materials, from George Gray s work in the UK and by workers at Hofmann-La Roche in Switzerland, indicated that the commercial pull was very strong.1 ,2 It is also indicative of the vast amount of research that has gone on over the...
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