High intensity UV laser curing of polymer dispersed liquid crystals

As it is well known, the final morphology of PDLCs samples depends on a number of parameters among which light intensity, curing time and temperature are probably the most important once one has choose a particular mixture to cure. In this work, we show the influence of these different external curing parameters on the film morphology of PDLCs obtained by strong UV laser irradiation of the homogeneous prepolymer-liquid crystal mixture. In particular. we show that some of these parameters can affect the morphological uniformity of the samples and can give rise to a highly interconnected 'channel' pattern, while the classic 'droplets' morphology is almost completely lost.