Contact-angle measurements as a means of probing the surface alignment characteristics of liquid crystal materials on photoalignment layers

The exceptionally high 1054-nm laser-damage resistance of photoalignment materials (approaching that of fused silica) has made it possible to fabricate a wide variety of photoaligned liquid crystal (LC) devices for high-peak-power laser applications. Despite these advances, materials selection and photoalignment exposure conditions are still determined using costly and time-consuming "trial-and-error" methods. The contact angle of a fluid droplet on an alignment layer yields important information about LC-surface physicochemical interactions, and as such, it has potential as a rapid and convenient metric for optimizing photoaligned device quality. To this end, we report on efforts to correlate fluid contact angle with surface energy and azimuthal-anchoring energy to aid in the assessment of alignment quality in photoalignment materials systems.