Thousand‐Fold Acceleration of Phase Decomposition in Polymer/Liquid Crystal Blends

The phase separation pro-cess is slow, both in the sense of actual time (of minutes tohours) and—as it is controlled by diffusion—in the sense ofthe power law evolution of the mean size of the domains. Inaddition to the traditional adjustment of the natural parame-ters of the process (temperature, composition), conceptuallynew advances attempt to affect the phase separation with anexternal electric field (EF). The use of an EF brings into focusthe role of ionic constituents. Tsori et al.