Effect of Temperature on the Refractive Indices of Liquid Crystals and Validation of a Modified Four-Parameter Model

The variation of refractive indices with temperature of three pure nematogenic compounds 5OCB, CPHB and 6CHBT were studied experimentally using thin prism technique. The refractive indices $n_{o}$ and $n_{e}$ were measured using 633 nm lines from a He-Ne laser. A modified four-parameter model was taken which is based on the Vuks equation describing the effect of temperature on the refractive indices of liquid crystals. In this paper we report the variation of refractive indices of these three liquid crystals with temperature, using the thin prism method. The variation in birefringence was determined experimentally. The variation in refractive indices and birefringence were also fitted theoretically using the modified Vuks equation. On comparison, the theoretically fitted values show close agreement with the experimental values.