The Center has assembled a Technical Advisory Board (TAB) of outstanding LC scientists and engineers from both large and small US companies interested in LC technology. The Center faculty and TAB work as a team to stimulate the transfer of Center research results to industry, and as a context for obtaining advice from the technology community regarding research directions, graduate education, and other issues of mutual interest. Companies and national labs currently represented on the TAB include 3M, Agilent, Alien Technologies, Apple Computer, Canon, Chorum, Displaytech, InFocus, Lexmark, Monsanto, Motorola, PhotonPort Technology, Polaroid, Three-Five Systems, and Sandia. Many members of the TAB are strongly coupled to the Center through collaborative research projects and/or a strong interest in FLCs.

A specific TAB responsibility is to direct the Center’s Boulder Liquid Crystal Workshops Program, designed to address in-depth science and technology issues in areas of critical importance to future LC applications. Four workshops have been organized by the Center Industrial Relations Committee since September 1998: Analog Electro-Optics Using Ferroelectric Liquid Crystals ; Liquid Crystal Alignment; Liquid Crystal Switching & Telecommunications; Banana Liquid Crystals: Chirality & Polarity; and Frontiers in Liquid Crystals and Molecular Self-Assembly. The Center has developed an effective and popular workshop format, which includes U.S., Center, and international invited speakers in addition to tutorial lectures by the Center PIs. The workshops have produced some remarkable highlights, e.g., the collective realization (at the Analog FLC workshop) of the connection between V-shaped analog switching, bookshelf alignment, antiferroelectric LCs, and giant electroclinic coefficients. Materials exhibiting all of these interesting and valuable properties are deVries smectics A, i.e., have tilted molecules in the smectic A phase.