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Updated: Sep 22, 2025

Measuring Magnetically-Tuned Ferroelectric Polarization in Liquid Crystals
Published on: August 15, 2018
Strong Orientational Coupling of Block Copolymer Microdomains to Smectic Layering Revealed by Magnetic Field
Manesh Gopinadhan1, Youngwoo Choo1, Chinedum O Osuji1
1Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, United States.
Abstract:
We elucidate the roles of the isotropic-nematic (I-N) and nematic-smectic A (N-SmA) transitions in the magnetic field directed self-assembly of a liquid crystalline block copolymer (BCP), using in situ X-ray scattering. Cooling into the nematic from the disordered melt yields poorly ordered and weakly aligned BCP microdomains. Continued cooling into the SmA, however, results in an abrupt increase in BCP orientational order with microdomain alignment tightly coupled to the translational order parameter of the smectic layers. These results underscore the significance of the N-SmA transition in generating highly aligned states under magnetic fields in these hierarchically ordered materials.
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