Alignment of nematic liquid crystals by a bent-core substrate

Abstract

Monolayers composed of bent-core liquid crystal molecules have recently been investigated in regard to a possible alignment method for bulk bent-core liquid crystal phases. This paper examines the use of a bent-core monolayer to align nematic liquid crystal phases, which are also used for optical detection of substrate orientation in many applications. Atomistic molecular dynamics simulation is used to gain an understanding at the molecular level of how the nematic liquid crystals are aligned by the monolayer. The nematic liquid crystal molecules preferentially enter the bent-core monolayer, and take on the orientation of the upper arm of the bent-core molecules in the layer. These results suggest that nematic liquid crystal phases can be aligned by a bent-core substrate.

Keywords:

• bent core
• molecular dynamics
• alignment
• monolayer

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by NSF grants DMR-0907055 and DMR-0906852. We thank the Ohio Supercomputer Center for the computational resources used for this study.