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Updated: Mar 7, 2026

Orientational Transition in a Liquid Crystal Triggered by the Thermodynamic Growth of Interfacial Wetting Sheets
Published on: May 15, 2017
Emergence of polar order and tilt in terephthalate based bent-core liquid crystals
Nerea Sebastián1, Sebastian Belau1, Alexey Eremin1
1Department of Nonlinear Phenomena, Institute for Experimental Physics, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany. alexey.eremin@ovgu.de.
Abstract:
A new bent-core liquid crystalline material consisting of a 4-cyanoresorcinol unit with two terephthalate based rod-like wings and terminated by two short alkyl chains was synthesized. Its liquid crystalline (LC) self-assembly and the development of polar order in the LC phases were investigated. The polar order is characterised using second harmonic generation and dielectric spectroscopy techniques in addition to XRD and DSC characterisations of the mesophase structure and investigation of freely suspended films. We demonstrate the growth of ferroelectric domains in the paraelectric SmA phase (SmAPR), which adopt antipolar correlations (SmAPAR) and eventually condense into a weakly tilted antiferroelectric smectic phase (SmCaPA).
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