Twist of cholesteric liquid crystal sandwiched between plates with asymmetry in anchoring energies

Alexei D. Kiselev; Victor Yu. Reshetnyak

doi:10.1117/12.545836

3 December 2003 Twist of cholesteric liquid crystal sandwiched between plates with asymmetry in anchoring energies

Alexei D. Kiselev, Victor Yu. Reshetnyak

Proceedings Volume 5257, Ninth International Conference on Nonlinear Optics of Liquid and Photorefractive Crystals; (2003) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.545836
Event: 2003 Chapter books, 2003, Bellingham, WA, United States

Abstract

We consider director configurations of cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) cells with two plane confining substrates. Exact solutions of the Euler-Lagrange equations for out-of-plane orientations of the easy axes that correspond to inhomogeneous conical structures of CLC director are derived. We study dependence of the CLC twist wavenumber on the free twisting number assuming that anchoring energies at the substrates are either equal or different. In both cases this dependence is found to be generally discontinuous with hysteresis loops an bistability effects involved. For CLC cells with identical substrates and planar anchoring conditions the jump-like behavior only disappears in the weak anchoring limit. Contrastingly, when the anchoring strengths are different, there is the finite value of anchoring below which the dependence becomes continuous. Another effect is the appearance of the gap between the adjacent twist wavenumber intervals representing locally stable director configurations. We calculate the critical value of anchoring asymmetry and present the results of numerical calculations.

Citation Download Citation

Alexei D. Kiselev and Victor Yu. Reshetnyak "Twist of cholesteric liquid crystal sandwiched between plates with asymmetry in anchoring energies", Proc. SPIE 5257, Ninth International Conference on Nonlinear Optics of Liquid and Photorefractive Crystals, (3 December 2003); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.545836

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