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.
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0603412,
title = {Orientational Coupling Amplification in Ferroelectric Nematic Colloids},
author = {Fenghua Li and Oleksandr Buchnev and Chae Il Cheon and Anatoliy Glushchenko and Victor Reshetnyak and Yuri Reznikov and Timothy J. Sluckin and John L. West},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0603412},
year = {2009}
}