Abstract
Quantitative measurement of anchoring strength of rubbing surface is quite important for research on physical properties of liquid crystal as well as its application, while they have been no suitable measurement method when the anchoring strength is high. Therefore, we propose a new method using phase transition droplet to evaluate the surface order parameter, which is relating to the surface anchoring. We have confirmed that this droplet method is useful to measure from strong to weak anchoring in the rubbed polymer surface. Also we have found that the surface anchoring increases according to the rubbing strength, and that no rubbing surface generally has certain value of surface order even though the azimuthal liquid crystal alignment is random, which means that the surface order in the polar distribution is relatively high.
