2007/05/01 by Jong-Bong Lee, Jong‐Bong Lee, Robert A. Pelcovits +1 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Chemistry · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Liquid Crystal Research Advancements #Plant Reproductive Biology #Surfactants and Colloidal Systems #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.75.051701
published as Phys Rev E 75, 011701 (2007)
openalex publication_date 2007/05/01 · arxiv created 2007/08/16 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Curved textures of ferroelectric smectic-C* liquid crystals produce space charge when they involve divergence of the spontaneous polarization field. Impurity ions can partially screen this space charge, reducing long-range interactions to local ones. Through studies of the textures of islands on very thin free-standing smectic films, we see evidence of this effect, in which materials with a large spontaneous polarization have static structures described by a large effective bend elastic constant. To address this issue, we calculated the electrostatic free energy of a free-standing film of ferroelectric liquid crystal, showing how the screened Coulomb interaction contributes a term to the effective bend elastic constant, in the static long-wavelength limit. We report experiments which support the main features of this model.