Sound Propagation in 5CB Liquid Crystals Homogeneously Confined in a Planar Cell

The Brillouin spectrum of 4'-n-pentyl-4-cyano-biphenyl (5CB) liquid crystals homogeneously confined in a planar liquid crystal (LC) cell was measured using a 6-pass tandem Fabry-Perot interferometer. By adopting a special right-angle scattering geometry, the sound velocity of 5CB was estimated from the Brillouin shift without knowing the refractive index. The sound velocity of the longitudinal wave propagating along the direction of the directors aligned parallel to the glass plates of the LC cell was 1784${\pm}$7 m/s at 300 K. The attenuation coefficient $\alpha$ was estimated to be approximately $1.9{\times}10^6m^{-1}$, which is about twice as large as that of the longitudinal sound wave propagating along the direction perpendicular to the directors. The present method may be very useful in the evaluation of the elastic properties of the materials used in display devices, whose refractive indices are not known.