Probing the wetting transition in a semiconducting liquid crystal thin film by neutron reflectivity

DOI

The aim of this experiment is to study the nucleation and molecular layer-by-layer growth of a 'thin film' (TF) phase at the buried substrate interface of thin films of fully deuterated liquid crystal, a problem that is particularly well suited to the application of neutron reflectivity. The importance of the LC system we propose here is that we observe an apparently thermodynamically stable TF phase at the substrate, something that has been rarely observed and will aid in the understanding of substrate induced phases in LC systems, and will also have wider applicability in the area of organic thin film devices. We will directly probe the thickness and structure of the TF wetting layer as a function of temperature by neutron reflectivity, as it assembles layer-by-layer on the substrate, and compare with theory.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.24083811
Metadata Access https://icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk/oaipmh/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=oai:icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk:inv/24083811
Provenance
Creator Professor Michele Sferrazza; Dr Johann de Silva
Publisher ISIS Neutron and Muon Source
Publication Year 2014
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 2011-04-11T07:29:42Z
Temporal Coverage End 2011-04-14T08:01:34Z