Abstract
Liquid crystals confined to structures with characteristic lengths below 1 mm, for example, in droplets dispersed in polymer (PDLC) or in silica aerogel, exhibit many new static and dynamic phenomena connected with the mesoscopic size, large surface to volume ratio, and strong elastic deformations imposed on the liquid crystal by the embedding matrix [1,2]. Most of the research focused on the structure and the effect of confinement on the phase transitions [3]. Some dynamic light scattering experiments, giving the fluctuations spectrum, were also performed, mainly on liquid crystals confined to porous glasses and silica aerogels [2,4]. The observed behavior shows generally a very wide distribution of the relaxation rates, different from the well defined exponentially relaxing modes in the bulk liquid crystals. The understanding of these dynamical processes is rather incomplete. In particular, little is known how much of the changes are due to the effects of the confinement on the viscoelastic properties of the liquid crystals and how much to the surface dynamical processes at the interfaces of the liquid crystal with the solid matrix, which dominate the dynamics due to the very large surface to volume ratio
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