Witold Brostow (1), Janusz Walasek (2)

(1) Departments of Materials Science and Chemistry, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203-5310, USA; brostow@unt.edu
(2) Department of Physics, Technical University of Radom, 26-600 Radom, Poland 

ABSTRACT

We analize existing theories of behavior of polymer liquid crystals (PLCs) in external fields such as electric or magnetic. Against this background, we recall a fairly general theory of PLCs [77] and extend it to include effects of the external fields. We consider in particular phase transitions that PLCs undergo. In some cases, the changes are qualitative only. However, we also observe significant quantitative modifications of phases caused by the presence of the fields.