Memory effect in nematic phase of liquid crystal doped with magnetic and non-magnetic nanoparticles

Abstract The dielectric properties of SiO 2 nanoparticles and their mixture with Fe 3 O 4 nanoparticles in 5CB liquid crystal were studied by using capacitance-voltage measurements. The prepared colloidal systems exhibited a soft memory effect detected by dielectric hysteresis in nematic phase at ambient temperature. In case of homogeneous SiO 2 nanoparticles as dopants, the doped liquid crystal showed the improvement of the effect, sensitive to increasing the nanoparticles concentration. The presence of magnetic nanoparticles caused decreasing the memory effect that was concentration dependent. Additional studies revealed that the temperature erased the observed effect as well as the fact that the different oriented magnetic field changed the magnitude of memory effect. The potential application of these composites leads to a fabrication of non-volatile and low power electro-optical memory devices suitable for information storage applications.