Abstract
Thin smectic liquid crystal films with competing boundary conditions (planar and homeotropic at opposing surfaces) form well-known striated structures known as “oily streaks”, which are a series of hemicylindrical caps that run perpendicular to the easy axis of the planar substrate. The streaks vanish on heating into the nematic phase, where the film becomes uniform and exhibits hybrid alignment. On adding sufficient reactive mesogen and polymerizing, the oily streak texture is maintained on heating through the entire nematic phase until reaching the bulk isotropic phase, above which the texture vanishes. Depending on the liquid crystal thickness, the oily streak structure may be retrieved after cooling, which demonstrates the strong impact of the polymer backbone on the liquid crystal texture. Polarizing optical, atomic force, and scanning electron microscopy data are presented.
Highlights
Polymer-stabilized liquid crystals (PSLCs) have piqued the interest of researchers since their first demonstration in the 1990s [1,2,3,4]
We study the evolution of the polymerized skeleton with temperature in order to determine the limiting temperature at which the polymerized oily streaks disappear, and reduce the temperature to examine the robustness of the just-heated liquid crystal/polymer network
The results indicate that the reactive mesogen has several effects on the liquid crystal
Summary
Polymer-stabilized liquid crystals (PSLCs) have piqued the interest of researchers since their first demonstration in the 1990s [1,2,3,4]. Given this structure, oily streaks are able to organize nanoparticles in single chains with strongly anisotropic optical properties [22,23,24,26].
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