Relaxation behavior of side chain and anchoring property on cross-linked bottlebrush polymer film

Abstract

An interaction between solid surface and liquid crystal restricts the change in the director of liquid crystal on the surface. It is reported that a concentrated polymer brush and a cross-linked bottlebrush polymer film composed of poly(hexyl methacrylate) exhibit extremely weak azimuthal anchoring coefficient (A2) at room temperature. In this study, we evaluated the dependency of A2 of cross-linked bottlebrush film on temperature and the rheological property of mixture of bottlebrush and liquid crystal as an indicator of the mobility of the side chains of cross-linked bottlebrush film swollen in liquid crystal in order to reveal the mechanism for the anchoring strength on cross-linked bottlebrush film.