In this article, we demonstrate that confocal Raman microscopy can be utilized to image the director fields of liquid crystal molecules, revealing the spatial patterns of the molecular orientational order both in lateral and axial directions. Here we report on the polarized confocal Raman imaging of the electric field-aligned uniaxial nematic liquid crystal and the in-depth director profiling of the focal conic domains of smectic A liquid crystal. The C≡N stretching vibrational band [ν(CN) = 2228 cm−1] and the C–C stretch of aromatic rings [ν(CC) = 1606 cm−1] are used to probe the spatial director orientations of 4-pentyl-4′-cyanobiphenyl (5CB) and 4-octyl-4′-cyanobiphenyl (8CB).
1 May 2017 in SID Symposium Digest of Technical Papers