Improving experimental procedures for assessing electrical properties of advanced liquid crystal materials

Electrical measurements of liquid crystals are a standard part of their material characterisation. Typically, such measurements are carried out using a sandwich-like cell of a single thickness. In this paper, we show that interactions between ions and substrates of a liquid crystal cell result in the dependence of the direct current electrical conductivity of liquid crystal materials on the cell thickness. The obtained experimental results combined with modelling point to the existence of ions of several types and to the competition between ion-releasing and ion-trapping processes in liquid crystal cells. We also propose to use a multi-electrode twin-cell that allows the visualisation of the electric field screening effect in liquid crystals and its mitigation by means of ferroelectric nanoparticles.