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Updated: Oct 20, 2025

Orientational Transition in a Liquid Crystal Triggered by the Thermodynamic Growth of Interfacial Wetting Sheets
Published on: May 15, 2017
Elastocaloric signature of nematic fluctuations
Matthias S Ikeda1,2,3, Thanapat Worasaran4,2,3, Elliott W Rosenberg4,2,3
1Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305; matikeda@stanford.edu kivelson@stanford.edu irfisher@stanford.edu.
Abstract:
The elastocaloric effect (ECE) relates changes in entropy to changes in strain experienced by a material. As such, ECE measurements can provide valuable information about the entropy landscape proximate to strain-tuned phase transitions. For ordered states that break only point symmetries, bilinear coupling of the order parameter with strain implies that the ECE can also provide a window on fluctuations above the critical temperature and hence, in principle, can also provide a thermodynamic measure of the associated susceptibility. To demonstrate this, we use the ECE to sensitively reveal the presence of nematic fluctuations in the archetypal Fe-based superconductor Ba([Formula: see text])2[Formula: see text] By performing these measurements simultaneously with elastoresistivity in a multimodal fashion, we are able to make a direct and unambiguous comparison of these closely related thermodynamic and transport properties, both of which are sensitive to nematic fluctuations. As a result, we have uncovered an unanticipated doping dependence of the nemato-elastic coupling and of the magnitude of the scattering of low-energy quasi-particles by nematic fluctuations-while the former weakens, the latter increases dramatically with increasing doping.
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