Mixture Alignments on Graphite Substrates in Cyanobiphenyl Liquid Crystals Observed using Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

Abstract
New alignments in three types of mixtures (9CB-8CB, 10CB-9CB and 10CB-8CB, where CB means 4'-n-alkyl-4-cyanobiphenyl) are observed. In the mixture of 9CB and 8CB, there is only one specific alignment. For the mixtures 10CB-9CB and 10CB-8CB, there are three and two specific alignments respectively. The feature that is common to all these mixtures is an anti-parallel alignment in a row of neighboring heterogeneous molecules. These characteristic mixture-alignments suggest a variety of molecular interactions in the mixtures.