 Abstract : A key characteristic of liquid crystals, exploited by many device applications, is their symmetry mandated responsivity. Describing the dynamics of the response of liquid crystalline systems to excitations is therefore of considerable interest and importance. Since orientational order is usually characterized in terms of an order parameter, the dynamic response of liquid crystals is often described in terms of the time evolution of the order parameter. A more general description, which gives more information yet is often simpler that the traditional approach, is the time evolution of the orientational probability density function. We describe a general procedure to obtain such a description, discuss its implementation and give several illustrative examples. |
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