Composite Materials Containing Perfluorinated and Siloxane Units for Vertical Alignment of Liquid Crystals.docVIP

Soft Nanoscience Letters, 2013, 3, 11-13 11 /10.4236/snl.2013.31003 Published Online January 2013 (/journal/snl) Composite Materials Containing Perfluorinated and Siloxane Units for Vertical Alignment of Liquid Crystals* Rasha Ata Alla , Gurumurthy Hegde , Lachezar Komitov , Andrea Morelli , Emo Chiellini , 1 1,2 1# 3 3 3 Giancarlo Galli 1 Liquid Crystal Group, Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden; 2 Faculty of Industrial Sciences and Technology, University Malaysia Pahang, Kuantan, Malaysia; Pisa, Pisa, Italy. # Email: komitov@physics.gu.se, murthyhegde@ 3 Department of Chemistry and Industrial Chemistry, University of Received November 16 , 2012; revised December 20 , 2012; accepted December 31 , 2012 th th st ABSTRACT Here we report on the study of vertical alignment of a nematic liquid crystal due to the segregation between perfluori- nated and the polysiloxane groups of a multi-component composite alignment material. The measured surface anchor- ing energy was found to depend on the relative amount of polysiloxane matrix in the composite material. These kind of self-assembly will reduce the preparation time for display by eliminating few steps. Keywords: VA; Nematic; Self Assembling; Vertical Alignment; Anchoring Energy 1. Introduction ment layers with low surface energy, such as the fluo- rine-rich films, usually gives rise to VA since the surface energy of the alignment layer is less than the surface en- ergy of the liquid crystal [8,9]. In general fluorination process enhances the rigidity of the molecules and in- creases the stability by reinforcin