Efeitos de superfície nas transições de fases por redução de camadas em filmes de cristal líquido livremente suspensos.

Abstract

Liquid crystals exhibit a great variety of phases which differ one from another by their structure and physical properties. Near a phase transition, these mesoscopic phases are very sensitive to the surface interactions showing interfacial phenomena which are extraordinarily variable and interesting. The interaction between boundary surfaces and liquid crystal molecules results in surface layers with properties strongly different from the interior ones. For example, it is observed experimentally the unusual phenomenon of layer thinning upon heating. Above the bulk Smetic A - Isotropic transition temperature, the film is thinned to a low number of layers as the temperature increases. The temperature of these layer thinning transitions are related to the film thickness by means of a simple power-law. The characteristic exponent, &#956;, measured from experiments using distinct compounds, varies slightly in the range 0.6 < &#956; < 0.8. In this work, we investigate how surface effects modify the order parameter profiles in the vicinity of the Smectic-A-Isotropic (Sm A - I) transition in freestanding liquid crystal films using an extended mean-field approach which allows to incorporate explicitly the anchoring of the surface layers in the effective potential. We observed the contribution of the surface anchoring to the film stability. We found that there is a characteristic surface anchoring above which the bulk layers are less ordered than the surface ones. We also determine the characteristic exponent which governs the transition temperature dependence with the film thickness. We show that the different values of the exponents are related with the ratio between the size of the central rigid portion of the molecules and the typical layer spacing, as well as to the range of film thicknesses investigated. Our results qualitatively reproduce the main experimental findings concerning the layer thinning transitions in free-standing smectic films.