Pretransitional Optical Activity in Chiral Smectic Liquid Crystals

Ferroelectric ordering and electroclinic effect in chiral smectic liquid crystals.

Ferroelectric ordering, the electroclinic effect, and chiral smectic C(SmC*)-smectic A phase transitions in thin planar ferroelectric liquid crystal (FLC) cells are studied by means of linear electro-optic and second harmonic generation (SHG) techniques. The ferroelectric switching is detected in biased FLC cells by measuring azimuthal dependences of linear and nonlinear responses. The applied ...

New electromechanical effect in chiral smectic C* liquid crystals

The Phase Transitions from Chiral Nematic toward Smectic Liquid Crystals

A Chen-Lubensky energy is used to investigate phase transitions from chiral nematic to smectic C* and smectic A* liquid crystal phases. We consider a liquid crystalline material Ω confined between two parallel plates, where the dimensions of Ω are assumed to be large relative both to the width of a smectic layer and the material’s chiral pitch. We take boundary conditions so that the smectic ph...

A Continuum Theory of Chiral Smectic C Liquid Crystals

We formulate a nonlinear continuum theory of flow of chiral smectic C liquid crystals (C*) involving molecular director, layer order parameter, polarization vector, flow velocity, and hydrostatic pressure fields. In addition to chiral orientational ordering, smectic C* phases also present positional ordering, with molecular centers of mass arranged in one dimensional layers. The nonzero tilt an...

Triply periodic smectic liquid crystals.

Twist-grain-boundary phases in smectics are the geometrical analogs of the Abrikosov flux lattice in superconductors. At large twist angles, the nonlinear elasticity is important in evaluating their energetics. We analytically construct the height function of a pi2 twist-grain-boundary phase in smectic-A liquid crystals, known as Schnerk's first surface. This construction, utilizing elliptic fu...