ABSTRACT
The in-depth understanding of the structure-property relationships encountered in liquid crystalline segmented copolymer systems is fundamental to establishing and exploiting the potential of these novel materials for technological applications. The underlying question of how to engineer the mechanooptic response can be answered only by understanding the response of the various parts of the macromolecular liquidcrystalline network (LC) to an applied strain. Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy is a very powerful tool for the study of polymer dynamics. Infrared absorption bands arising from the functional groups are sensitive not only to the neighboring functional groups but also to physical factors such as molecular orientation and crystallinity. In recent years, FT-IR spectroscopy has been frequently used to study stress-induced molecular orientation in polymeric systems. Two variations of this experiment are used, depending on the time-dependent nature of the perturbation. In the static mode, where no time-dependence is involved, the experiment for studying the molecular response to a static or a step-wise strain is called an infrared linear dichroism experiment.
