How smectic-A and smectic-C liquid crystals resolve confinement-induced frustration in spherical shells
Majumdar, Apala and Han, Yucen and Lagerwall, Jan P.F. and Walba, David M and Sharma, Anjali and Margini, Mitchell (2024) How smectic-A and smectic-C liquid crystals resolve confinement-induced frustration in spherical shells. Soft Matter. ISSN 1744-6848 (https://doi.org/10.1039/D4SM01263A)
Preview |
Text.
Filename: Majumdar-etal-How-smectic-A-and-smectic-C-liquid-crystals-resolve-confinement-induced-frustration-in-spherical-shells.pdf
Final Published Version License: Download (7MB)| Preview |
Abstract
The layered structure of smectic liquid crystals cannot develop unobstructed when confined to spherical shells with layers extending in the radial direction, since the available cross section area increases from the inside to the outside of the shell yet the number and thickness of layers must be constant. For smectic-A (SmA) liquid crystals, with the layer normal m parallel to the director n, the frustration breaks up the texture into spherical lune domains with twist deformations of alternating sense, overlaid with a herringbone-like secondary modulation and mediated via localized bend regions where the boundary conditions are violated. The SmC phase has more degrees of freedom to resolve the frustration thanks to its non-zero tilt angle τ between n and m, but its response to tangential shell confinement was never studied. We show experimentally and theoretically that the lunes in shells undergoing a SmA–SmC transition become twice as wide and half as many and they lose the secondary modulation, adopting a configuration with no layer twist but uniform layer bend if τ reaches a large enough value. Our study expands our understanding of how smectics respond to spherical confinement and it opens new soft matter research opportunities, given the rich diversity of phases with SmC-like symmetry, including chiral and spontaneously polarized phases.
ORCID iDs
Majumdar, Apala ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4802-6720, Han, Yucen, Lagerwall, Jan P.F., Walba, David M, Sharma, Anjali and Margini, Mitchell;-
-
Item type: Article ID code: 91242 Dates: DateEvent22 November 2024Published22 November 2024Accepted28 October 2024SubmittedSubjects: Science > Chemistry > Crystallography Department: Faculty of Science > Mathematics and Statistics Depositing user: Pure Administrator Date deposited: 25 Nov 2024 11:46 Last modified: 03 Dec 2024 10:03 Related URLs: URI: https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/91242