Tilt, polarity, and spontaneous symmetry breaking in liquid crystals
- 1 May 1998
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Physical Society (APS) in Physical Review E
- Vol. 57 (5) , R4875-R4878
- https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.57.r4875
Abstract
We show through explicit molecular modeling how tilt may be induced in layered mesophases and propagate across the layers, using a concrete representation of flexible tail-core-tail calamitic mesogens in conjunction with the variational cluster expansion. The results demonstrate that spontaneous symmetry breaking observed in smectic liquid crystals—the tilt of the director relative to the layers—can be induced by excluded volume interactions, both in the synclinic and in the anticlinic configurations.Keywords
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