Importance of Free-standing Smectic Membranes

There are a number of reasons for the interest in free-standing smectic membranes. First, thin smectic membranes are models of two-dimensional fluids (SmA and SmC) and crystals (SmB). By varying the film thickness, one therefore can study the crossover from three- to two-dimensional behavior as well as the influence of surfaces on the morphology and the phase behavior. 

Accordingly, for 3D and 2D crystals, the amplitude of the fluctuations remains finite even for infinite sample sizes, whereas in smectic liquid crystals the thermod5mamic fluctuations logarithmically diverge with the linear size of the sample, L 

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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