  In this work we incorporate some real-system effects into the theory of
orientational phase transitions under shear flow (M. E. Cates and S. T. Milner,
Phys. Rev. Lett. v.62, p.1856 (1989) and G. H. Fredrickson, J. Rheol. v.38,
p.1045 (1994)). In particular, we study the influence of the shear-cell
boundaries on the orientation of the lamellar phase. We predict that at low
shear rates the parallel orientation appears to be stable. We show that there
is a critical value of the shear rate at which the parallel orientation loses
its stability and the perpendicular one appears immediately below the spinodal.
We associate this transition with a crossover from the fluctuation to the
mean-field behaviour. At lower temperatures the stability of the parallel
orientation is restored. We find that the region of stability of the
perpendicular orientation rapidly decreases as shear rate increases. This
behaviour might be misinterpreted as an additional perpendicular to parallel
transition recently discussed in literature.
