Browsing by Author "Fink, Werner"

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Open Access
Biaxiality of chiral liquid crystals
(1994) Longa, Lech; Fink, Werner; Trebin, Hans-Rainer
Using the extended de Gennes–Ginzburg–Landau free energy expansion in terms of the anisotropic part Q αβ(x) of the dielectric tensor field, a connection between the phase biaxiality and the stability of various chiral liquid crystalline phases is studied. In particular, the cholesteric phase, the cubic blue phases, and the phases characterized by an icosahedral space group symmetry are analyzed in detail. Also, a general question concerning the applicability of the mean-field approximation in describing the chiral phases is addressed. By an extensive study of the model over a wide range of the parameters, a class of phenomena, not present in the original de Gennes–Ginzburg–Landau model, has been found. These include (a) reentrant phase transitions between the cholesteric and the cubic blue phases and (b) the existence of distinct phases of the same symmetry but of different biaxialities. The phase biaxiality serves here as an extra scalar order parameter. Furthermore, it has been shown that, due to the presence of competing bulk terms in the free energy, the stable phases may acquire a large degree of biaxiality, also in liquid crystalline materials composed of effectively uniaxial molecules. A study of icosahedral space group symmetries provides a partial answer to the question of whether or not an icosahedral quasicrystalline state can be stabilized in liquid crystals. Although, in general, the stability of icosahedral structures could be enhanced by the extra terms in the free energy, no absolutely stable icosahedral phase has been found.
Open Access
Liquid-crystalline blue phase III and structures of broken icosahedral symmetry
(1993) Longa, Lech; Fink, Werner; Trebin, Hans-Rainer
The structure of the liquid-crystalline blue phase III (BPIII) is still unknown and remains one of the mysteries of liquid-crystal physics. We take all icosahedral space-group symmetries of the reciprocal space for BPIII and study their thermodynamic stability within the frame of an extended de Gennes–Ginzburg–Landau free-energy expansion. The stability of the icosahedral structures is compared with that of the cholesteric phase and of the cubic blue phases. Strikingly, even though the extended model contains three extra parameters, we could not detect a region of parameter space where icosahedral structures are absolutely stable just below the isotropic phase.