Browsing by Author "Messman, P"

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Unique approach to measuring temperature variation of surface tension in smectic liquid crystals
(2003-12-01)
Veum, M
;
Messman, P
;
Liu, ZQ
;
Huang, CC
;
Janarthanan, N
We have measured the temperature variation of surface tension, sigma, in freestanding films of three liquid-crystal compounds. To do so, we have constructed a curvature-pressure tensiometer that uses a feedback loop to hold constant the curvature of a film while the temperature of the system is smoothly ramped. The apparatus enables us to obtain the temperature variation of sigma in a continuous manner with resolution in sigma of similar to0.2%. We interpret reproducible features of our data in terms of phase transitions. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.