The Bandol Summer School on Liquid Crystals

LC Lab welcomes you to a week-long summer school with lectures and experiments, forming a comprehensive introduction to the science of liquid crystals. The school is mainly intended for undergraduate and graduate students of physics, chemistry, engineering or similar directions but also for research staff and technicians new to the field of liquid crystals. The focus will be on the physics and physical properties of liquid crystals (understandable for chemists) and the technical application of the materials, but there will also be discussion on the chemistry of liquid crystals (understandable for physicists).

Our ambition is to provide explanations for essentially all phenomena that you will observe through the polarizing microscope - and quite a bit more. The lecturers are active university researchers with considerable experience of academic teaching on the subject. Because the practical work at the polarizing microscope is an important part of the course - and we believe this is a unique feature of the school - the number of participants is restricted to sixteen. At the end of every day there will also be a special session for discussion and questions with all lecturers present.

Bandol is a charming seaside resort on the south coast of France. It is easily reached from the airports of Nice, Marseille or Toulon and by train. The school participants will be accommodated in a pleasant hotel directly on the beach. The lectures and practical work will take place at LC Lab three minutes from the hotel.

Course contents
A unique feature of this summer school is the continuous interplay between classroom style teaching and laboratory experiments. In addition to lectures and exercises, the program contains a large component of practical lab work and discussions. As the number of teachers is almost half the number of students, the contact will be close and you will have lots of opportunities to ask questions. There will be a large number of demonstrations using didactic models particularly powerful to explain the complex optics of liquid crystals. The practical work includes basic polarizing microscopy, analysis of textures with demonstrations of the occurring defects, including e.g. disclinations, grandjean steps, focal conics and zigzags in smectics, as well as observing different electrooptic effects in nematics, PDLCs, cholesterics, FLCs and AFLCs.

Topics to be covered include:
- Liquid crystal phases and classes
- Physical properties of liquid crystals
- Liquid crystal thermodynamics and statistical physics
- Chirality in liquid crystals
- Polarizing optical microscopy investigation of liquid crystals
- Other experimental characterization techniques
- Applications of liquid crystals

Lecturers

S. T. Lagerwall, F. Giesselmann, P. Rudquist, D. Kruerke, J. Lagerwall, G. Scalia, D. Blunk