Determination of liquid-crystal polar anchoring energy by electrical measurements.

We propose a simple method for the determination of liquid-crystal (LC) polar anchoring energy by electrical measurements. The basic idea of this method is a two-channel scheme for capacitance measurements. The first channel uses one cell with a planar LC cell, while the second a LC cell with vertical alignment. One of the LC cells can have a high pretilt angle. The proposed method allows investigating anchoring properties of both planar and vertical aligned LC materials. Simultaneous measurements of the two cells compensate all volume effects in LC bulk and provide a good opportunity to study directly the LC-surface interaction. The method can be applied for LC cells, which do not have uniform azimuthal orientation. We used this method to investigate the polar anchoring properties of photoaligning material before and after illumination and for LC structures with a high pretilt angle.