Organic molecular beam deposition of a smectic-like liquid crystal film

Compounds forming the Smectic E phase are a good candidate for field effect transistor materials in printed electronics, especially for the development of flexible electronic applications. Specular NR is proposed to be used for a precision structural description of the thin SmE LC films in a wide range of thicknesses. It is expected to detect differences in terms of scattering length density for layers near the substrate and far from it. Such data can indicate the type of orientation of these elongated molecules at the first stages of synthesis. For these purposes, we will additionally use a series of partially deuterated samples, allowing us to obtain reflectivities for two contrasts. Another issue in this study will be analyzing the up-down orientation of two types of LC molecules in the layers for ferroelectric ordering, which will be easily observed for “half-deuterated” molecules.