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Updated: Aug 11, 2025

Measuring Magnetically-Tuned Ferroelectric Polarization in Liquid Crystals
Published on: August 15, 2018
Nonabelian Ginzburg-Landau theory for ferroelectrics
You-Quan Li1,2,3, Pei Wang4, Hua Zhang5
1Chern Institute of Mathematics, Nankai University, Weijin Road 94, Tianjin 300071, People's Republic of China.
Abstract:
The Ginzburg-Landau theory, which was introduced to phenomenologically describe the destruction of superconductivity by a magnetic field at the beginning, has brought up much more knowledge beyond the original one as a mean-field theory of thermodynamics states. There the complex order parameter plays an important role. Here we propose a macroscopic theory to describe the features of ferroelectrics by a two-component complex order parameter coupled to nonabelian gauge potentials that provide more freedom to reflect interplays between different measurables. Within this theoretical framework, some recently discovered empirical static and time-independent phenomena, such as vortex, anti-vortex, spiral orders can be obtained as solutions for different gauge potentials. It is expected to bring in a new angle of view with more elucidation than the traditional one that takes the polarization as order parameter.
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