The effect of dispersion on polarization colors in microconfined liquid crystals

Polarization colors in birefringent media result when the optical rotation of light is transduced into a periodic, wavelength-dependent intensity by the use of polarizers. These colors are the most vivid when there are less than three peaks in the visible regime and are commonly used in optical minerology as an identification tool. In this work, we examine the effect of the dispersion of the nematic liquid crystal 5CB in geometries with micron length scales on polarization colors. Using values from the literature, we compute the spectra and compare them with the dispersionless case using the average value across the visible spectrum. We demonstrate how to convert the spectra into colors and show the significant differences between the dispersive and dispersionless polarization colors. We show that the experimental results using 5CB in wedge cells and electrospun microfibers is in good agreement with our dispersive colorimetric calculations.