Ferroelectric Liquid Crystals: Properties of Binary Mixtures and Pure Compounds with High Spontaneous Polarisation

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Abstract
The correlation between the molecular structure and the magnitude and sign of the spontaneous polarisation of ferroelectric liquid crystals has been studied using mixtures and pure compounds. Several binary mixtures consisting of a chiral dopant and a non chiral smectic C compound have been prepared. The spontaneous polarisation with values up to 10 nC/cm2 for mixtures containing 10% of a chiral dopant was measured. Three homologous series of new ferroelectric liquid crystals which show values of the spontaneous polarisation up to 300 nC/cm2 have been prepared by the esterification of 4-alkyloxy-4′-hydroxybiphenyls with three a-chloro carboxylic acids obtained from the a-amino acids valine, leucine, and isoleucine. Within a homologous series the spontaneous polarisation was found to increase considerably with decreasing alkyl chain length to an extend which could not be explained by the behaviour of the tilt angle which increases only slightly.

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