Electrically driven dynamic effects in nematic liquid crystals

Electric field causes a plethora of physical effects in liquid crystals, which are of prime practical importance in applications such as electrooptical devices. Typical electrooptical response time of liquid crystal is on the order of millisecond. The first part of the presentation is to explore responses that occur at much shorter time scales of nanoseconds and microseconds. Electric field is also known to cause periodic modulations of the director in various regimes of electroconvection. These director modulations form periodic patterns that occupy the entire electrode areas. The second part of the talk demonstrates that the electric field can produce stable, steerable, and spatially confined particle-like propagating 3D solitary waves of the oscillating molecular director that are called director bullets.