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Studies of liquid crystal (LC) /Au nanoparticle (NP) composites have been pursued in columnar and in nematic phases of thermotropic LCs. Using LCs forming a columnar phase, we found that different functionalities on the corona of the Au NPs (hydrophobic vs. hydrophilic) display unique effects on the stability and ordering of the columnar LC phase. Doping nematic LCs with non-chiral or chiral Au NPs causes the formation of textures commonly observed for chiral nematic LCs, i.e., the formation of somewhat uniform stripe textures or patterns separated by areas of homeotropic alignment of LC molecules. Two scenarios are proposed. In the first scenario, the Au NPs form topological chain-like defects and the remaining Au NPs reside at the interface inducing vertical alignment of the LC molecules. In the second scenario, chiral Au NPs transfer chirality to the nematic LC host. Further, induced circular dichroism studies proved the second scenario. Using the same chiral Au NP systems, the origin of chirality of Au NPs has also been studied, and a powerful methodology has been proposed to unravel the puzzle of chirality of chiral ligand-protected Au NPs. Further investigations of these texture phenomena led to the discovery of using metal NPs to control the orientation and alignment of LCs. In due course, a dual alignment and electro-optical switching behaviour was found using alkylthiol-capped Au NPs doped into a nematic LC with positive dielectric anisotropy in planar namatic LC cells. This study was also expanded to Ag and CdTe NPs, which showed the same phenomenon, and all investigated NPs significantly reduced the voltage needed to re-orient the LCs in an electric field (threshold voltage). Starting from basic and moving on to more application-oriented research, we finally also initiated structure-property relationship studies of LC/NP composites.

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