Reorientation directors

Owing to the impurities and other photochaige producing agents present in the liquid crystal cells, three forms of space-chaige fields are created within the bulk of the cell a typical photorefiactive component E and two other components i A and caused by the dielectric and conductivity anisotropies " in conjunction with the reoriented director axis (see Fig. 8.13b). 

Figure C2.2.2. Isotropic, nematic and chiral nematic phases. Here n denotes tire director. In tire chiral nematic phase, tire director undergoes a helical rotation, as schematically indicated by its reorientation around a cone.

AH distortions of the nematic phase may be decomposed into three basic curvatures of the director, as depicted in Figure 6. Liquid crystals are unusual fluids in that such elastic curvatures may be sustained. Molecules of a tme Hquid would immediately reorient to flow out of an imposed mechanical shear. The force constants characterizing these distortions are very weak, making the material exceedingly sensitive and easy to perturb. 

Liquid crystal displays depend upon the reorientation of the director , the defining alignment vector of a population of liquid crystalline molecules, by a localised applied electric field between two glass plates, which changes the way in which incident light is reflected directional rubbing of the glass surface imparts a... 

Here the vector rj represents the centre of mass position, and D is usually averaged over several time origins to to improve statistics. Values for D can be resolved parallel and perpendicular to the director to give two components (D//, Dj ), and actual values are summarised for a range of studies in Table 3 of [45]. Most studies have found diffusion coefficients in the 10 m s range with the ratio D///Dj between 1.59 and 3.73 for calamitic liquid crystals. Yakovenko and co-workers have carried out a detailed study of the reorientational motion in the molecule PCH5 [101]. Their results show that conformational molecular flexibility plays an important role in the dynamics of the molecule. They also show that cage models can be used to fit the reorientational correlation functions of the molecule. 

Director Reorientation of Liquid Crystalline Polymers Under Shear and... 

Since P must remain normal to z and n, the polarization vector forms a helix, where P is everywhere normal to the helix axis. While locally a macroscopic dipole is present, globally this polarization averages to zero due to the presence of the SmC helix. Such a structure is sometimes termed a helical antiferroelectric. But, even with a helix of infinite pitch (i.e., no helix), which can happen in the SmC phase, bulk samples of SmC material still are not ferroelectric. A ferroelectric material must possess at least two degenerate states, or orientations of the polarization, which exist in distinct free-energy wells, and which can be interconverted by application of an electric field. In the case of a bulk SmC material with infinite pitch, all orientations of the director on the tilt cone are degenerate. In this case the polarization would simply line up parallel to an applied field oriented along any axis in the smectic layer plane, with no wells or barriers (and no hysteresis) associated with the reorientation of the polarization. While interesting, such behavior is not that of a true ferroelectric. 

Using this method, the M6R8/PM6R8 blend showed precisely the behavior expected for the achiral SmAPA structure. Specifically, the optical properties of the films were consistent with a biaxial smectic structure (i.e., two different refractive indices in the layer plane). The thickness of the films was quantized in units of one bilayer. Upon application of an electric field, it was seen that films with an even number of bilayers behaved in a nonpolar way, while films with an odd number of bilayers responded strongly to the field, showing that they must possess net spontaneous polarization. Note that the electric fields in this experiment are not strong enough to switch an antiferroelectric to a ferroelectric state. Reorientation of the polarization field (and director structure) of the polar film in the presence of a field can easily be seen, however. 

Figure 15 A lamellar block copolymer phase is reoriented through external shear. The initial phase has the direction of the lamellae parallel to the shear gradient direction. The most stable state would be to orient the director parallel to the shear and shear gradient direction. However, the reorientation process gets stuck before true equilibrium is reached. The stuck orientation is relatively stable, because the lamellae have to be broken up before they can further align with respect to the shear flow. Reprinted with permission from Ref. 56.

Finally, magnetic nanowires and other submicrometer-scale anisometric particles can also be manipulated and organized via controlled spatial variations in the alignment of nematic liquid crystals. Leheny and co-workers, for example, measured the elastic forces imposed on anisotropic Ni nanowires suspended in a nematic liquid crystal (here 5CB, Fig. 13a), and showed that by applying a magnetic field the nanowire reorients and distorts the director in the adjacent area [445, 446]. 

From now on, the permeation in (16) is neglected as it is several orders of magnitude smaller than the advection due to the radial component of the velocity vr (now playing the role of vz in the planar case). As far as the velocity perturbation is concerned, our aim is to describe its principal effect-the radial motion of smectic layers, i.e., instead of diffusion (permeation) we now have advective transport. In this spirit we make several simplifications to keep the model tractable. The backflow-flow generation due to director reorientation-is neglected, as well as the effect of anisotropic viscosity (third and fourth line of (19)). Thereby (19) is reduced to the Navier-Stokes equation for the velocity perturbation, which upon linearization takes the form... 

Not only can molecules constituting the oriented phase be thus studied. Solutes present in this mesophase will also be oriented through operation of anisotropic intermolecular forces. An example is that of deuterium-labeled D gramicidin. When dissolved in a nematic mesophase, it displays a series of deuterium doublets. Their residual splittings 6v are almost temperature-independent. This points to a rigid structure for the peptide, an helix that reorients about the director of the liquid crystalline phase (18). 

Such a value appears to be intermediate between the two types of motion mentioned above. The explanation is that the above values apply to fully dispersed systems. We are monitoring here the "fast reorientation of a local director for clay platelets that have stacked-up into tactoids and that therefore are much slower in reorienting. 

We can now speculate as to the molecular nature of this reorientational motion of the PTFE backbone in the amorphous state. We assume that our experimentally determined order parameters closely represent the average value of l/2<3cos 0-l> of all the molecular chains in the amorphous regions, i.e., we ignore a distribution of order parameters and the effects of nonaxially symmetric deviations from the local director. 

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