Resonant carbon K-edge soft x-ray scattering from lattice-free heliconical molecular ordering: soft dilative elasticity of the twist-bend liquid crystal phase
arXiv:1512.08340 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.147803
Abstract
Resonant x-ray scattering shows that the bulk structure of the twist-bend liquid crystal phase, recently discovered in bent molecular dimers, has spatial periodicity without electron density modulation, indicating a lattice-free heliconical nematic precession of orientation that has helical glide symmetry. In situ study of the bulk helix texture for the dimer CB7CB shows an elastically-confined temperature-dependent minimum helix pitch, but a remarkable elastic softness of pitch in response to dilative stresses. Scattering from the helix is not detectable in the higher temperature nematic phase.
Supplemental Materials included
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Cited by in corpus (20)
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