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Register a new userPseudo-Casimir interactions and surface anchoring duality in bookshelf geometry of smectic-A liquid crystals
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Added by
Fahimeh Karimi Pour Haddadan
Publication date
2018
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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We analyze the transverse intersubstrate pseudo-Casimir force, arising as a result of thermal fluctuations of the liquid crystalline layers of a smectic-A film confined between two planar substrates in a bookshelf geometry, in which the equidistant smectic layers are placed perpendicular to the bounding surfaces. We discuss the variation of the interaction force as a function of the intersubstrate separation in the presence of surface anchoring to the substrates, showing that the force induced by confined fluctuations is attractive and depends on the penetration length as well as the layer spacing. The strongest effect occurs for tightly confined fluctuations, in which the surface anchoring energy is set to infinity, where the force per area scales linearly with the thermal energy and inversely with the fourth power of the intersubstrate separation. By reducing the strength of the surface anchoring energy, the force first becomes weaker in magnitude but then increases in magnitude as the surface anchoring strength is further reduced down to zero, in which case the force tends to that obtained in the limit of strong anchoring.
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Random (disordered) components in the surface anchoring of the smectic-A liquid crystalline film in general modify the thermal pseudo-Casimir interaction. Anchoring disorder of the quenched type is in general decoupled from the thermal pseudo-Casimir force and gives rise to an additional disorder-generated interaction, in distinction to the annealed disorder, whose effect on the pseudo-Casimir force is non-additive. We consider the effects of the surface anchoring disorder by assuming that one of the substrates of the film is contaminated by a disorder source, resulting in a Gaussian-weighted distribution of the preferred molecular anchoring orientation (easy axes) on that substrate, having a finite mean and variance or, more generally, a homogeneous in-plane, two-point correlation function. We show that the presence of disorder, either of the quenched or annealed type, leads to a significant reduction in the magnitude of the net thermal fluctuation force between the confining substrates of the film. In the quenched case this is a direct consequence of an additive free energy dependent on the variance of the disorder, while in the annealed case, the suppression of the interaction force can be understood based on a disorder-renormalized, effective anchoring strength.
We study the topology of smectic defects in two and three dimensions. We give a topological classification of smectic point defects and disclination lines in three dimensions. In addition we describe the combination rules for smectic point defects in two and three dimensions, showing how the broken translational symmetry of the smectic confers a path dependence on the result of defect addition.
General microscopic mechanism of ferroelectric ordering in chiral smectic C* liquid crystals is considered. It is shown that if the mesogenic molecules have a sufficiently low symmetry, the spontaneous polarization is proportional to one of the biaxial vector order parameters of the smectic C phase. This order parameter may be determined by intermolecular interactions which are not sensitive to molecular chirality. At the same time, the polarization is also proportional to a pseudoscalar parameter which vanishes if the molecules are nonchiral. The general statistical theory of ferroelectric ordering is illustrated by two particular models. The first model is based on electrostatic quadrupole-quadrupole interactions, and it enables one to obtain explicit analytical expressions for the spontaneous polarization. In the second model, the molecular chirality and polarity are determined by a pair of off-center nonparallel dipoles. For this case, the spontaneous polarization is calculated numerically as a function of temperature. The theory provides a more general interpretation of the previous approaches including the classical Boulder model.
We develop a theory of Smectic A - Smectic C phase transition with anomalously weak smectic layer contraction. We construct a phenomenological description of this transition by generalizing the Chen-Lubensky model. Using a mean-field molecular model, we demonstrate that a relatively simple interaction potential suffices to describe the transition. The theoretical results are in excellent agreement with experimental data.
In 3D nematic liquid crystals, disclination lines have a range of geometric structures. Locally, they may resemble $+1/2$ or $-1/2$ defects in 2D nematic phases, or they may have 3D twist. Here, we analyze the structure in terms of the director deformation modes around the disclination, as well as the nematic order tensor inside the disclination core. Based on this analysis, we construct a vector to represent the orientation of the disclination, as well as tensors to represent higher-order structure. We apply this method to simulations of a 3D disclination arch, and determine how the structure changes along the contour length. We then use this geometric analysis to investigate three types of forces acting on a disclination: Peach-Koehler forces due to external stress, interaction forces between disclination lines, and active forces. These results apply to the motion of disclination lines in both conventional and active liquid crystals.
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