Novel Universality Classes in Ferroelectric Liquid Crystals

Amit K Chattopadhyay, Prabir K. Mukherjee

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    Abstract Starting from a Langevin formulation of a thermally perturbed nonlinear elastic model of the ferroelectric smectic-C* (SmC*) liquid crystals in the presence of an electric field, this article characterizes the hitherto unexplored dynamical phase transition from a thermo-electrically forced ferroelectric SmC* phase to a chiral nematic liquid crystalline phase and vice versa. The theoretical analysis is based on a combination of dynamic renormalization (DRG) and numerical simulation of the emergent model. While the DRG architecture predicts a generic transition to the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality class at dynamic equilibrium, in agreement with recent experiments, the numerical simulations of the model show simultaneous existence of two phases, one a subdiffusive (SD) phase characterized by a dynamical exponent value of 1, and the other a KPZ phase, characterized by a dynamical exponent value of 1.5. The SD phase flows over to the KPZ phase with increased external forcing, offering a new universality paradigm, hitherto unexplored in the context of ferroelectric liquid crystals.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)397-403
    JournalJournal of Molecular Liquids
    Volume249
    Early online date8 Nov 2017
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2018

    Bibliographical note

    © 2017, Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
    http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

    Keywords

    • Ferroelectric liquid crystals
    • Kosterlitz-Thouless transition
    • renormalization group theory;
    • Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation

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