Ferroelectric liquid crystals excellence

Chiral smectic ferroelectric liquid crystals are liquids that possess spontaneous polar order. Combined with their excellent processibility on silicon integrated circuits, these liquid crystals provide an attractive potential approach to synthesis of materials for second order nonlinear optics, provided adequate second order susceptibility can be obtained. Unfortunately, the second-order nonlinear optical susceptibility of the ferroelectric liquid crystals are usually low and their thermal stability is limited. Several, very interesting approaches to utilization of liquid crystals, however, were carried out. 

In the 1980s, the interest in the basic physicochemical properties of ferroelectric liquid crystals (FLCs) was flourishing, and FLCs were eagerly studied for the next-generation liquid crystal materials that would replace the traditional nematic LCs, because of their excellent properties, such as microsecond-order high-speed... 

Study of free-standing membranes is also extremely important to map the polar nature of ferroelectric, ferrielectric and antiferroelectric liquid crystals of chiral and bent-core achiral molecules. An excellent overview of smectic membranes with detailed results and list of literature has been published recently by de Jeu et al. ... 

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