Photoinduced ordering and anchoring properties of azo-dye films

TL;DR

This study combines theoretical and experimental approaches to understand how photoinduced ordering in azo-dye films affects their anchoring properties with nematic liquid crystals, revealing linear dependencies and discrepancies explained by surface-bulk order differences.

Contribution

It provides a combined theoretical and experimental analysis of azo-dye film anchoring properties, highlighting the relationship with photoinduced order and addressing discrepancies with a phenomenological model.

Findings

Surface anchoring energy depends linearly on azo-dye order parameter.

Azimuthal anchoring strength decays to zero as photoinduced order vanishes.

Discrepancy between theory and experiment explained by surface and bulk order differences.

Abstract

We study both theoretically and experimentally anchoring properties of photoaligning azo-dye films in contact with a nematic liquid crystal depending on photoinduced ordering of azo-dye molecules. In the mean field approximation, we found that the bare surface anchoring energy linearly depends on the azo-dye order parameter and the azimuthal anchoring strength decays to zero in the limit of vanishing photoinduced ordering. From the absorption dichroism spectra measured in the azo-dye films that are prepared from the azo-dye derivative with polymerizable terminal groups (SDA-2) we obtain dependence of the dichroic ratio on the irradiation dose. We also measure the polar and azimuthal anchoring strengths in nematic liquid crystal (NLC) cells aligned by the azo-dye films and derive the anchoring strengths as functions of the dichroic ratio. Though linear fitting of the experimental data for both anchoring strengths gives reasonably well results, it, in contradiction with the theory, predicts vanishing of the azimuthal anchoring strength at certain nonzero value of the azo-dye order parameter. By using a simple phenomenological model we show that this discrepancy can be attributed to the difference between the surface and bulk order parameters in the films.