Abstract
A nematic liquid-crystalline slab is considered in which some rod-like particles are randomly distributed. The particles are locally elongated either homeotropic or planar with respect to the confining substrates of the cell. We consider thermal fluctuations of a nematic director which is aligned perpendicular to the confining substrates due to strong homeotropic anchoring at the substrates. The resulting fluctuation-induced force across the cell is analyzed for an annealed disorder in the anchoring of the nematic director at the dispersed mesoscopic particles. Within the saddle-point approximation to free energy of the system, the effect of the disorder is renormalization of the strength of the mean anchoring which is assumed to be homeotropic. By increasing the variance of the disorder, the modes become less massive and deviations from the mean behavior become larger, so that the disorder-free universal long-range attraction, due to the soft modes, is approached.
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