Novel Universality Classes in Ferroelectric Liquid Crystals
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1705.08705,
title = {Novel Universality Classes in Ferroelectric Liquid Crystals},
author = {Amit K Chattopadhyay and Prabir K Mukherjee},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.08705},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
14 pages, 6 figures