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Orientational Coupling Amplification in Ferroelectric Nematic Colloids

Fenghua Li, Oleksandr Buchnev, Chae Il Cheon, Anatoliy Glushchenko, Victor Reshetnyak, Yuri Reznikov, Timothy J. Sluckin, John L. West

cond-mat.mtrl-sciarXiv:cond-mat/0603412

Abstract

We investigated the physical properties of low concentration ferroelectric nematic colloids, using calorimetry, optical methods, infra-red spectroscopy and capacitance studies. The resulting colloids normally remain homogeneous, but the nematic orientational coupling is significantly amplified. In particular cases, the nematic orientation coupling increases by 10% for particle concentrations of 0.2%. A manifestation of the increased orientational order is that the clearing temperature of a nematic colloid increases up to 40 Celsius degrees compared to the pure LC host. A theoretical model is proposed in which the ferroelectric particles induce local dipoles whose effective interaction is proportional to the square of the orientational order parameter.

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