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Published on: May 15, 2017
High-resolution calorimetric study of phase transitions in chiral smectic-C liquid crystalline phases
1Department of Physics, Tokyo Institute of Technology, O-okayama, Meguro, Tokyo 152-8551, Japan.
Abstract:
We carried out an improved characterization of phase transitions among chiral smectic-C subphases observed for various antiferroelectric liquid crystals by precise heat capacity measurements. It was found that the phase transitions are intrinsically first order exhibiting a remarkable heat anomaly which involves little pretransitional thermal fluctuation and a finite thermal hysteresis. On the other hand, we also noticed that the critical point of the smectic-C(α)(*)-smectic-C* transition is induced by the destabilization of the smectic-C(α)(*) phase which couples with the fluctuation associated with the smectic-A-smectic-C(α)(*) phase transition.
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