Abstract
The high-resolution calorimetric study was carried out on octylcyanobiphenyl liquid crystal (LC) confined to various controlled-pore glass (CPG) matrices with silane-treated surface. The diameter of the voids cross section ranged between 23.7 and . The results are compared to those obtained previously on CPG voids nontreated with silane. We found a striking similarity between the shifts in the isotropic to nematic and nematic to smectic- phase transition temperatures as a function of the void radius in which order parameter variations at the LC-void interface play the dominant role. Weaker temperature shifts are observed in silane-treated samples, where surface ordering tendency is larger. In nontreated samples, a finite-size scaling law in the maximum value of the heat capacity at the nematic to smectic- transition was observed for void diameters larger than . In silane-treated samples, this behavior is considerably changed by surface wetting interactions.
5 More- Received 21 June 2004
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.70.051703
©2004 American Physical Society