Molecular Crystals and Liquid Crystals Science and Technology. Section A. Molecular Crystals and Liquid Crystals, Vol.367, 2971-2978, 2001
On the surface stabilized smectic phase at very thin system
The effect of the wall to the smectic layer ordering is studies at thin liquid crystalline system by generalizing the McMillan theory on smectics. Every order of smectic layers is proved not to vanish, and a crossover from a long range order to a surface sustained one is shown to occur near a bulk transition temperature. The dependence of transition temperature between smectic phase and nematic one at the parallel aligned case is obtained, where the transition temperature is determined from the global behaviour of the order averaged over the whole system.
Keywords:surface stabilized smectic phase;symmetry breaking field for smectic layer;MacMillan theory;homeotropic anchoring;XY model