Parabolic focal conic domain

Note 5 A focal-conic domain built around two confocal parabolae is called a parabolic focal-conic domain. 

Unaligned, disrupted smectics, such as those prepared by quenching from an elevated temperature into the smectic state, are frequently filled with focal conic domains (Sethna and Kleman 1982 Lavrentovich 1986 Larson and Mather 1997). Parabolic focal conic domains can be packed to fill space as shown in Fig. 10-30a. Another packing, which... 

Besides parabolic and polygonal focal domains, in samples that are reasonably aligned, isolated conic domains called torical focal conic domains can appear (Lavrentovich et al. 1994). A sketch is shown in Fig. 10-33a, and a series of such domains is shown in Fig. 10-33b. If a three-dimensional lattice of such domains forms, the smectic is broken up into discrete multilamellar polyhedra, or deformed onions. This occurs in lyotropic smectics under flow (see Section 12.4.2.3). 

The total energy F scales like a(l-e ) and becomes in principle vanishingly small when e 1, i.e. for the so-called parabolic focal domains (PFD), where the two conjugate conics are two parabolae. But note that K(e ) increases without limit for e 1, and that the... 

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