Molecular Crystals and Liquid Crystals, Vol.375, 165-173, 2002
Orientation of nematic liquid crystals on random anchoring surface
We report on the studies of LC orientation on random aligning surface. We developed a method of obtaining a surface with random distribution of the easy axis orientation. Alignment of 5CB LC in a cell consisted of a reference regular aligning surface and a random aligning surface was studied. We recovered angular distribution of the domains' orientation for different cell thickness. We observed a transformation of initially uniform random angular director distribution to the anisotropic distribution with a preferable axis along rubbing direction on the reference substrate as the cell thickness decreases.