Organization of the polarization splay modulated smectic liquid crystal phase by topographic confinement.

ABSTRACT: Recently, the topographic patterning of surfaces by lithography and nanoimprinting has emerged as a new and powerful tool for producing single structural domains of liquid crystals and other soft materials. Here the use of surface topography is extended to the organization of liquid crystals of bent-core molecules, soft materials that, on the one hand, exhibit a rich, exciting, and intensely studied array of novel phases, but that, on the other hand, have proved very difficult to align. Among the most notorious in this regard are the polarization splay modulated (B7) phases, in which the symmetry-required preference for ferroelectric polarization to be locally bouquet-like or "splayed" is expressed. Filling space with splay of a single sign requires defects and in the B7 splay is accommoda

SUBMITTER: Ki Yoon D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3003079 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature