Emergent Anti-Ferroelectric Ordering and the Coupling of Liquid Crystalline and Polar Order

Abstract

Polar liquid crystals possess three dimensional orientational order coupled with unidirectional electric polarity, yielding fluid ferroelectrics. Such polar phases are generated by rod-like molecules with large electric dipole moments. 2,5-Disubstituted 1,3-dioxane is commonly employed as a polar motif in said systems, and here we show this to suffer from thermal instability as a consequence of equatorial-trans to axial-trans isomerism at elevated temperatures. We utilise isosteric building blocks as potential replacements for the 1,3- dioxane unit, and in doing so we obtain new examples of fluid ferroelectric systems. For binary mixtures of certain composition, we observe the emergence of a new fluid antiferroelectric phase - a finding not observed for either of the parent molecules. Our study also reveals a critical tipping point for the emergence of polar order in otherwise apolar systems. These results hint at the possibility for uncovering new highly ordered polar LC phases and delineate distinct transition mechanisms in orientational and polar ordering.

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• Antiferroelectric order in nematic liquids: Flexoelectricity vs electrostatics
• Reactive Fluid Ferroelectrics: A Gateway to the Next Generation of Ferroelectric Liquid Crystalline Polymer Networks
• Colossal Dielectric Permittivity and Superparaelectricity in phenyl pyrimidine based liquid crystals
• Ferri- and Ferro-Electric Switching in Spontaneously Chiral Polar Liquid Crystals
• Polarity from the Bottom Up: A Computational Framework for Predicting Spontaneous Polar Order
• Mean-field theory of the uniaxial ferroelectric smectic A liquid crystal phase
• Helix alignment, chevrons, and edge dislocations in twist-bend ferroelectric nematics