Ordering of droplets and light scattering in polymer dispersed liquid crystal films

We study the effects of droplet ordering in initial optical transmittance through polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) films prepared in the presence of an electrical field. The experimental data are interpreted by using a theoretical approach to light scattering in PDLC films that explicitly relates optical transmittance and the order parameters characterizing both the orientational structures inside bipolar droplets and orientational distribution of the droplets. The theory relies on the Rayleigh-Gans approximation and uses the Percus-Yevick approximation to take into account the effects due to droplet positional correlations.Comment: revtex4, 18 pages, 8 figure

On micro-structural effects in dielectric mixtures

The paper presents numerical simulations performed on dielectric properties of two-dimensional binary composites on eleven regular space filling tessellations. First, significant contributions of different parameters, which play an important role in the electrical properties of the composite, are introduced both for designing and analyzing material mixtures. Later, influence of structural differences and intrinsic electrical properties of constituents on the composite's over all electrical properties are investigated. The structural differences are resolved by the spectral density representation approach. The numerical technique, without any {\em a-priori} assumptions, for extracting the spectral density function is also presented.Comment: 24 pages, 8 figure and 7 tables. It is submitted to IEEE Transactions on Dielectrics and Electrical Insulatio