ABSTRACT
The main and always the present feature of transient electro-optics is the reorientational motions of the whole macromolecule–if it is rigid–or its component parts–if it is flexible–following the changes in the field. The complexity of the problem limited the reach of the purely theoretical advances, posing important difficulties in the treatment, for instance, of the electro-optics in fields of moderate or greater strength, and also in the hydrodynamics of rigid particles of irregular shapes or flexible particles. Electro-optics consider the optical properties induced in a material by the application of an electric field. Birefringence, and in general the electro-optic properties, are caused by the orientational effect of the field on the polar or polarizable solute molecules, whose orientation, which is uniformly random in the absence of the fields, becomes random, although not uniform but biased by the external agent. Rigid particles respond to the application or removal of an electric field by changing their orientation in a rotational motion.
