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Elestic constants in the interfacial layer at the nematic-liquid-crystal-vapour interface

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Il Nuovo Cimento D

Summary

Close to the interface between a nematic liquid crystal (NLC) and another medium, the elastic constants become functions of distancez from the interface and of angle θ between the directorn and the unit vectork orthogonal to the interface. Furthermore, due to the breaking of the translation symmetry at the interface, a lot of new subsurface elastic contributions can appear. In a previous paper we investigated these subsurface anomalies by using a simple molecular model based on induced-dipole-induced-dipole interactions and by making numerical calculations in the special case of a planar director distortion. In this way, only the numerical values of some effective subsurface elastic constants that characterise planar director distortions could be obtained. In this paper we make a more complete analytical calculation of all the subsurface elastic constants by using a microscopic model and a more general theoretical procedure. The microscopic interaction energy is written in a general form that allows us to investigate different kinds of intermolecular interactions (induced diple-induced dipole, quadrupole-quadrupole and so on). Both thez-dependence and the θ-dependence of the subsurface elastic constants are obtained in a closed analytical form. In the special case of induced-dipole-induced-dipole interactions and for planar director distortions, our analytical results are shown to agree with the previous numerical results. The important macroscopic effect of these elastic subsurface anomalies is discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    S. Faetti & M. Riccardi

  2. INFM, Pisa, Italy

    S. Faetti

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  1. S. Faetti
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  2. M. Riccardi
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Faetti, S., Riccardi, M. Elestic constants in the interfacial layer at the nematic-liquid-crystal-vapour interface. Il Nuovo Cimento D 17, 1019–1052 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02456790

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02456790

PACS 61.30

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