Mojtaba Farrokhbin

Motivated by our recent work, in this work, we present the numerical study of the anchoring effect on the Frederiks threshold field in a nematic liquid crystal doped with ferroelectric colloidal nanoparticles. Assuming weak anchoring conditions, we employ the relaxation method and Maxwell construction to numerically solve the Euler–Lagrangian differential equation for the total free energy together the Rapini–Papoular surface energy to take into account anchoring of nematic liquid crystal molecules at the substrates. In this study, we focus our attention on obtaining the phase diagrams of Frederiks transition for different values of anchoring strength which have been not computed in our previous work. In this way, the effect of nanoparticle radius, nanoparticle volume fraction, nanoparticle polarization, and cell thickness on the Frederiks transition for different values of anchoring conditions are summarized in the phase diagrams. The numerical results show that by increasing the nanoparticles size and nanoparticle volume fraction in the ferronematic system, the Frederiks threshold field is strongly reduced.