Nuclear magnetic resonance: a powerful tool to study liquid crystals

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a spectroscopic technique widely used to investigate materials and soft matter in particular. In this brief review, the main uses of NMR techniques to investigate different aspects of liquid crystals, such as the orientational and dynamic properties, the supramolecular structure and average molecular conformations, are described. In the second part of the paper, the case study of a ‘de Vries’ liquid crystal is reported and the main results obtained by combining different NMR techniques are discussed.