Novel smectic phases and orientational order switching in two-dimensional liquid crystalline system.

Liquid crystalline (LC) materials are ubiquitous in our modern life. Most of the applications where LC materials find their use depend on maintaining the orientation of the constituent LC particles. In this article, we report a recipe to control the molecular orientation. We have done a computer simulation study of a two-dimensional (2D) liquid crystalline material consisting of soft ellipses. The pair interaction is modelled by using the Gay–Berne potential. The 2D LC material is set to interact with an underlying substrate which varies periodically in one-dimension (1D) only. By controlling the substrate parameters like periodicity and strength, we showed that a nematic phase LC material transitions into different novel phases. We finally show that by applying a substrate with large periodicity, the substrate strength can be used as a control parameter to steer the LC director. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]