Confinement and Lubrication in Liquid Crystal Films

DOI

Liquid crystals (LCs) are known to act as good lubricants, however, the reason for this remains unclear. One contributing factor is thought to be the formation of ordered layers at the surface which grow out into the bulk, known as smectic wetting. We have recently developed a surface force style apparatus which combines neutron reflection with confinement of a thin LC film between a silicon surface and an inflated flexible membrane. A very recent experiment to confine three different cyanobiphenyls (6, 8 and 10CB) showed promising results, in particular for nematic 8CB. We would like to further quantify the effect of confinement using spin coated layers of 8CB which will determine the proportion of material in the smectic wetting layers compared with the nematic bulk and hence increase our understanding of this fundamental LC property.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.24090139
Metadata Access https://icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk/oaipmh/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=oai:icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk:inv/24090139
Provenance
Creator Professor Rob Richardson; Dr Laura Mears; Professor Terence Cosgrove; Dr Wiebe De Vos; Dr Stuart Prescott; Dr Stephen Abbott
Publisher ISIS Neutron and Muon Source
Publication Year 2016
Rights CC-BY Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Contact isisdata(at)stfc.ac.uk
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Discipline Photon- and Neutron Geosciences
Temporal Coverage Begin 2013-03-06T08:41:24Z
Temporal Coverage End 2013-03-11T08:59:42Z