Surface alignment disorder and pseudo-Casimir forces in smectic-A liquid crystalline films

TL;DR

This paper investigates how surface anchoring disorder in smectic-A liquid crystalline films affects the thermal pseudo-Casimir forces, revealing that disorder generally reduces the magnitude of these fluctuation-induced interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of quenched and annealed surface anchoring disorder effects on pseudo-Casimir forces in smectic-A films, including a model with Gaussian-distributed anchoring orientations.

Findings

Disorder reduces the net thermal fluctuation force between substrates.

Quenched disorder's effect is additive and depends on disorder variance.

Annealed disorder leads to a disorder-renormalized effective anchoring strength.

Abstract

Random (disordered) components in the surface anchoring of the smectic-A liquid crystalline film in general modify the thermal pseudo-Casimir interaction. Anchoring disorder of the quenched type is in general decoupled from the thermal pseudo-Casimir force and gives rise to an additional disorder-generated interaction, in distinction to the annealed disorder, whose effect on the pseudo-Casimir force is non-additive. We consider the effects of the surface anchoring disorder by assuming that one of the substrates of the film is contaminated by a disorder source, resulting in a Gaussian-weighted distribution of the preferred molecular anchoring orientation (easy axes) on that substrate, having a finite mean and variance or, more generally, a homogeneous in-plane, two-point correlation function. We show that the presence of disorder, either of the quenched or annealed type, leads to a significant reduction in the magnitude of the net thermal fluctuation force between the confining substrates of the film. In the quenched case this is a direct consequence of an additive free energy dependent on the variance of the disorder, while in the annealed case, the suppression of the interaction force can be understood based on a disorder-renormalized, effective anchoring strength.