Accurate determination of liquid-crystal tilt bias angles

A detailed analysis is given for three techniques used to determine the tilt bias angle of a nematic liquid crystal in contact with a boundary surface. Two of these methods, the crystal rotation and capacitive methods, have severe disadvantages, such as a restricted range of application, an insufficient accuracy, and sometimes require knowledge of nematic material constants which have to be determined by separate experiments. A third and more useful method, a magnetic null method, makes it possible to determine the tilt bias angle directly with only one measurement to an accuracy of 0.1°, regardless of the size of the angle or the nature of the nematic liquid crystal. Using the magnetic null method we have investigated the tilt bias angles of nematics in contact with glass substrates onto which a coating of SiO had been obliquely evaporated. We find that the tilt bias angle decreases with increasing evaporation angle (both angles measured from sample plane) until a critical evaporation angle of ?14° is reached, whereupon the director reorients out of the plane of incidence of the evaporation beam and assumes a direction normal to this plane with a 0° tilt bias. We also find that the tilt bias angle varies from compound to compound for the same evaporation parameters and is influenced by temperature and trace impurities.