{"database":"biostudies-literature","file_versions":[],"scores":null,"additional":{"submitter":["Chen X"],"funding":["National Science Foundation (NSF)","DOE","Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade","Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT)","National Science Foundation"],"pagination":["e2217150120"],"full_dataset_link":["https://www.ebi.ac.uk/biostudies/studies/S-EPMC9974471"],"repository":["biostudies-literature"],"omics_type":["Unknown"],"volume":["120(8)"],"pubmed_abstract":["We have structurally characterized the liquid crystal (LC) phase that can appear as an intermediate state when a dielectric nematic, having polar disorder of its molecular dipoles, transitions to the almost perfectly polar-ordered ferroelectric nematic. This intermediate phase, which fills a 100-y-old void in the taxonomy of smectic LCs and which we term the \"smectic Z<sub>A</sub>,\" is antiferroelectric, with the nematic director and polarization oriented parallel to smectic layer planes, and the polarization alternating in sign from layer to layer with a 180 Å period. A Landau free energy, originally derived from the Ising model of ferromagnetic ordering of spins in the presence of dipole-dipole interactions, and applied to model incommensurate antiferroelectricity in crystals, describes the key features of the nematic-SmZ<sub>A</sub>-ferroelectric nematic phase sequence."],"journal":["Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America"],"pubmed_title":["The smectic Z<sub>A</sub> phase: Antiferroelectric smectic order as a prelude to the ferroelectric nematic."],"pmcid":["PMC9974471"],"funding_grant_id":["1710711","DE-SC0012704","2005170","1420736","APP-35428"],"pubmed_authors":["Korblova E","Zhernenkov M","Wang C","Glaser MA","Walba DM","Maclennan JE","Chen X","Freychet G","Radzihovsky L","Martinez V","Zhu C","Clark NA"],"additional_accession":[]},"is_claimable":false,"name":"The smectic Z<sub>A</sub> phase: Antiferroelectric smectic order as a prelude to the ferroelectric nematic.","description":"We have structurally characterized the liquid crystal (LC) phase that can appear as an intermediate state when a dielectric nematic, having polar disorder of its molecular dipoles, transitions to the almost perfectly polar-ordered ferroelectric nematic. This intermediate phase, which fills a 100-y-old void in the taxonomy of smectic LCs and which we term the \"smectic Z<sub>A</sub>,\" is antiferroelectric, with the nematic director and polarization oriented parallel to smectic layer planes, and the polarization alternating in sign from layer to layer with a 180 Å period. A Landau free energy, originally derived from the Ising model of ferromagnetic ordering of spins in the presence of dipole-dipole interactions, and applied to model incommensurate antiferroelectricity in crystals, describes the key features of the nematic-SmZ<sub>A</sub>-ferroelectric nematic phase sequence.","dates":{"release":"2023-01-01T00:00:00Z","publication":"2023 Feb","modification":"2025-04-04T20:04:42.687Z","creation":"2025-04-04T20:04:42.687Z"},"accession":"S-EPMC9974471","cross_references":{"pubmed":["36791101"],"doi":["10.1073/pnas.2217150120"]}}