The role of polar and dispersive parts of surface tension on the bistability of SmC cells

Abstract

We observe that the behaviour of SmC cells (number of stable, twisted or untwisted states as well as the value of the angle θ of these states with respect to the rubbing direction) is strongly linked with the polarity of the alignment layers. Thus we demonstrate that the polar part γ^P of the surface tension determined by a physicochemical technique is well correlated to the surface dipole content and to the polar anchoring energy of a SmC.