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Studies on birefringence, order parameter and image analysis of liquid crystalline p-n butyloxy/butyl benzoic acid with dispersed ZnO nanoparticles

Abstract ZnO nanoparticles (nps) have wide range of applications and improve the optical parameters of molecules of soft liquid crystalline (LC) materials. The present paper mainly discusses the optical studies on LC materials regarding p-n-butyloxybenzoic acid (4oba) and p-n-butylbenzoic (4ba) compound along with homogeneous dispersion of ZnO nps in lower weight concentration, i.e., 1, 1.5, 2 and 2.5 wt%. The existence and size of ZnO nps in LC compounds are well determined through spectroscopic techniques such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The temperatures of LC compounds and phase transitions are determined by using polarizing optical microscopy (POM) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) which is found to decrease with increasing concentration of dispersed ZnO nps. Image enhancement with visual quality matrix method is used to improve the quality of the image. Specially designed wedge-shaped modified spectrometer is used to determine the refractive indices with different wavelengths (460, 500, 570 and 635 nm). The refractive indices measured are fitted with two and three coefficient Cauchy model. Further, the order parameter S of the molecules of 4ba and 4oba with dispersed ZnO nps are determined by molecular field models namely Kuczynski, Vuks and effective geometry model, respectively. From the data, it is found that the values of birefringence (δn) and order parameter (S) of the molecules of 4oba and 4ba are enhanced with the dispersion of ZnO nps with increasing weight concentrations in the stabilized nematic thermal region.