On alignment of nematic liquid crystals infiltrating chiral sculptured thin films

A structurally right-handed chiral sculptured thin film (STF) with a central 90 deg-twist defect was made by thermal evaporation of chalcogenide glass and the use of a serial bi-deposition process to exhibit a narrowband hole in the spectrum of the right-circularly polarized light reflected when right-circularly polarized light is normally incident on the chiral STF. In an attempt to build a tunable filter, the chiral STF was then infiltrated with a highly birefringent nematic liquid crystal (LC), which caused a linear reflectance peak to redshift by ∼350 nm. But the circular Bragg phenomenon exhibited by the uninfiltrated chiral STF was greatly diminished owing to the similarity in the constitutive properties of the LC and the chalcogenide glass. No temperature dependence of the shifted peak was observed, which provided clear evidence that the LC molecules are not ordered inside the chiral STF but are randomly aligned instead.