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Title: Smectic-B phase and temperature-driven smectic-B to -A transition in concentrated solutions of “gapped” DNA
Award ID(s):
2005212
NSF-PAR ID:
10402106
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Physical Review Research
Volume:
4
Issue:
3
ISSN:
2643-1564
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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  1. We have structurally characterized the liquid crystal (LC) phase that can appear as an intermediate state when a dielectric nematic, having polar disorder of its molecular dipoles, transitions to the almost perfectly polar-ordered ferroelectric nematic. This intermediate phase, which fills a 100-y-old void in the taxonomy of smectic LCs and which we term the “smectic Z A ,” is antiferroelectric, with the nematic director and polarization oriented parallel to smectic layer planes, and the polarization alternating in sign from layer to layer with a 180 Å period. A Landau free energy, originally derived from the Ising model of ferromagnetic ordering of spins in the presence of dipole–dipole interactions, and applied to model incommensurate antiferroelectricity in crystals, describes the key features of the nematic–SmZ A –ferroelectric nematic phase sequence. 
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