Liquid Crystalline Soft Matter
ILCC 2012 tutorial on polarizing microscopy
Click on a preview to view the corresponding movie section in a floating window.
Part 1
Introduction & overview
Part 2
Basics of light and linear polarization
Part 3
Introduction to the refractive index and birefringence
Part 4
Effects of lambda/4 and lambda/2 plates
Part 5
The general birefringence case and analogy with the bipendulum in mechanics
Part 6
Effects of rotating the optic axis in the oscillation plane, and tilting it out of that plane, respectively.
Part 7
Explanation of the birefringence colors and introduction to the Michel-Levy diagram
Part 8
Sample alignment terminology + example of textures during Iso-N-SmA-SmC sequence
Part 9
Texture examples from planar SmA-SmC sequence + how to monitor variations in orientational order using the birefringence color
Part 10
Rotation of the sample around the viewing axis and introduction to using the lambda slider
Part 11
Determining the director orientation using a lambda slider
Part 12
Overview of the microscope parts, section 1
Part 13
Overview of the microscope parts, section 2 + orthoscopy vs. conoscopy
Part 14
Conjugate planes + the condensor and how it can be adjusted
Part 15
Adjusting the field and aperture diaphragms + Köhler illumination
Part 16
Some common mistakes
If you liked this tutorial you may also be interested in my ILCC 2006 tutorial on dielectric spectroscopy. You can find the corresponding movie files here.