Liquid Crystal Sample

 I spent the last week of my internship working with Liquid Crystal Samples! I'm calculating their Mueller Matrices, just like I did earlier with the nanorods. Liquid Crystals are cool because their molecular organization gives them interesting optical properties, like the polarization changes I was measuring. The liquid crystal interacts with the laser and, in the future, we could the the Mueller Matrix setup I've been working on at the same time we use the Spatial Light Modulator others students worked with to really understand these crystals better. 

Here you can see how the liquid crystals "change color" with different polarized light! We call this "Dichrosim." 





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Paris Life Update #5

This week we saw the large hadron collider, every nerds dream trip. I mean, it’s all underground, but we stood by it and talked about science. Close enough, right? Geneva has some of the bluest water I’ve ever seen! Bonus last photo - we found a neighborhood slide and I way underestimated how fast I could go..
Read more

Prep. for Scanning Electron Microscope

Image
Tomorrow is the ultimate test of everything I've done so far! I've been trying to figure out the orientation of nanorods with polarized light, but until now I haven't had an answer key to compare my results with. The nanorods are too small to determine how they are oriented with visible light, so we have to turn to something with an even smaller wavelength. That's where the scanning electron microscope comes in! Since electrons have a much smaller wavelength than visible light, we can create a topographical map of my sample. If the polarization method I've been working on matches the map, we win!  To get ready, I prepared more nanorod samples on special, conductive slides. Today I took them into the lab and compared them with the regular glass slides to see if the nanorods were deposited correctly. That's where it got complicated. The conductive slides are much thicker than the glass slides and were impossible to view with the 40x objective we were using. The sl
Read more