Wavenumber of Self-organized Stripes in Liquid Crystal Gels

Abstract

In liquid crystal nematic gels, self-organized stripe domains can appear in response to certain external stimuli. To gain experimental insights into their mechanism　by which their wavenumber is determined, we studied the difference in stripes formed by varying the anisotropy of the polymer chain and surface anchoring, measuring two-dimensional maps of local director characteristics using microscope. Both the stripe spacing formed by varying the polymer chain anisotropy and surface anchoring were dependent in the opposite direction to theory. This suggested that the contribution of the free energy of the liquid crystal was smaller than the theory.