title: Nonmonotonic behavior of the nematic tilt angle in a temperature-induced surface transition.
abstract: We report on a nonmonotonic temperature behavior of the pretilt in cells containing polymers as alignment layers. The latter are very promising since they enable control of the anchoring of the liquid crystal. We show that such a behavior cannot be interpreted by the standard Landau or mean-field theory. We propose a generalization of the mean-field model, including the temperature dependence of the anchoring due to the polymer layer that enables a description of the nonlinear behavior. The agreement between the predictions of the model and the experimental data is good.
authors.affiliation: Liquid Crystal Physics, Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg, SE-412 96, Gothenburg, Sweden.
authors.forename: Giovanni
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Barbero
authors.forename: Ingolf
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Dahl
authors.forename: Lachezar
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Komitov