Polar Smectic Films

Abstract

We report on a new experimental procedure for forming and studying polar smectic liquid crystal films. A free standing smectic film is put in contact with a liquid drop, so that the film has one liquid crystal/liquid interface and one liquid crystal/air interface. This polar environment results in changes in the textures observed in the film, including a boojum texture and a previously unobserved spiral texture in which the winding direction of the spiral reverses at a finite radius from its center. Some aspects of these textures are explained by the presence of a Ksb term in the bulk elastic free energy density that favors a combination of splay and bend deformations.

4 pages, REVTeX, 3 figures, submitted to PRL

References in corpus (1)

• Textures and the shapes of domains in Langmuir monolayers

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Role of electrostatics in the texture of islands in free standing ferroelectric liquid crystal films
• Textural transformations in islands on free standing Smectic C* liquid crystal films
• Boojums in Rotating Two-Component Bose-Einstein Condensates
• Chiral hedgehog textures in 2D XY-like ordered domains
• Numerical studies of domains and bubbles of Langmuir monolayers