Optical birefringence studies of a binary mixture with the nematic-smectic Ad-re-entrant nematic phase sequence

Calorimetric, optical and dielectric measurements on two Schiff's based liquid crystalline materials exhibiting multiple phase transitions

We report high-resolution calorimetric, optical and dielectric studies on two Schiff's based liquid crystalline materials, 4O.5 and 5O.5, which exhibit multiple phase transitions. The study goes beyond the commonly studied isotropic-to-nematic (I-N) and nematic-to-smectic A (N-SmA) phase transitions and explores higher-order smectic phase transitions. The critical exponent, α values, for different phase transitions has been explored. For the I-N, N-SmA, SmA-SmC, SmC-SmF, SmF-CrG and SmB-CrG transitions, α values close to 0.5 and amplitude ratios A-/A+ ~ 1.6 and D-/D+ ~ 1 indicate a first-order nature. Notably, for the SmA-SmB transition, although α (≈ 0.64) is larger than the tricritical value of 0.5, A-/A+ ~ 1.2 and D-/D+ ~ 1, and the study reports an order parameter critical exponent (β) of 0.26 ± 0.002, which supports a tricritical nature for this transition. Importantly, the ratios of A-/A+ and D-/D+ are found to have similar values across all three-measurement methods, indicating consistency and agreement among these methods.

Determination of refractive indices for liquid crystals using a double transmission technique

We report a new, to the best of our knowledge, approach to determine the refractive indices (RIs) of liquid crystal (LC) systems by considering a double transmission phenomenon of a light beam within the LC medium and the principle of the wedged-cell refractometer. This modified system delivers better spatial resolution of refracted beams in terms of well-resolved spots, compared to the single transmission of a beam in the conventional thin-prism method. The deviation angle obtained in this method is found to be comparatively greater than that of the thin-prism method. The higher values of deviation angle are described using a theoretical model and further experimentally demonstrated for the 5CB nematic LC compound. The variation of the principal RIs (n_o, n_e), and hence the birefringence (Δn) with temperature as well as electric field is investigated for both transmission methods. A relative comparison is carried out between the simulated and standard values obtained from literature. The present technique provides a higher spatial beam resolution to determine the RIs and birefringence of LC systems, which can be very advantageous for different modern photonic applications based on beam shaping and steering.

Effect of hockey-stick-shaped molecules on the critical behavior at the nematic to isotropic and smectic-A to nematic phase transitions in octylcyanobiphenyl

In the field of soft matter research, the characteristic behavior of both nematic-isotropic (N-I) and smectic-A nematic(Sm-A N) phase transitions has gained considerable attention due to their several attractive features. In this work, a high-resolution measurement of optical birefringence (Δn) has been performed to probe the critical behavior at the N-I and Sm-A N phase transitions in a binary system comprising the rodlike octylcyanobiphenyl and a laterally methyl substituted hockey-stick-shaped mesogen, 4-(3-n-decyloxy-2-methyl-phenyliminomethyl)phenyl 4-n-dodecyloxycinnamate. For the investigated mixtures, the critical exponent β related to the limiting behavior of the nematic order parameter close to the N-I phase transition has come out to be in good conformity with the tricritical hypothesis. Moreover, the yielded effective critical exponents (α', β', γ') characterizing the critical fluctuation near the Sm-A N phase transition have appeared to be nonuniversal in nature. With increasing hockey-stick-shaped dopant concentration, the Sm-A N phase transition demonstrates a strong tendency to be driven towards a first-order nature. Such a behavior has been accounted for by considering a modification of the effective intermolecular interactions and hence the related coupling between the nematic and smectic order parameters, caused by the introduction of the angular mesogenic molecules.

Universality of the nematic mesophase

This paper presents a detailed comparative study of published order-parameter experimental data of nematic liquid crystals. Throughout a simple linear transformation, it is shown that three distinct nematic mesophases exhibit the same and unique universal behavior for all temperatures below the nematic-isotropic phase transition. This paper generalizes a previous one [M. Simões, D. S. Simeão, S. M. Domiciano, and A. de Campos, Phys. Lett. A 372, 5346 (2008)], in which only the nematic mesophase delimited by the crystalline phase at low temperature was studied. Here we have assembled order-parameter experimental data of 61 different compounds, forming a set with data of 96 experiments, aiming to show that the nematic universal behavior is independent of what is the actual phase or mesophase bordering the nematic phase at low temperatures; our results show that all experimental data of all nematic mesophases coalesce along a common line that extends over the entire range of mesophases.

Critical behavior of a nonpolar smectogen from high-resolution birefringence measurements

We report high-sensitivity and high-temperature resolution experimental data for the temperature dependence of the optical birefringence of a nonpolar monolayer smectogen 4-butyloxyphenyl-4'-decyloxybenzoate (10[over ¯].O.4[over ¯]) liquid crystal by using a rotating-analyzer technique. The birefringence data cover nematic and smectic-A phases of the 10[over ¯].O.4[over ¯] compound. The birefringence data are used to probe the temperature behavior of the nematic order parameter S(T) in the vicinity of both the nematic-isotropic (N-I) and the nematic-smectic-A (N-SmA) transitions. For the N-I transition, from the data sufficiently far away from the smectic-A phase, the average value of the critical exponent β describing the limiting behavior of S(T) is found to be 0.2507±0.0010, which is in accordance with the so-called tricritical hypothesis, which predicts β=0.25 and excludes higher theoretical values. The critical behavior of S(T) at the N-I transition is discussed in detail by comparing our results with the latest reports in the literature and we conclude that by comparing with the previously reported results, the isotropic internal field assumption by the Vuks-Chandrasekhar-Madhusudana model is adequate to extract the critical behavior of S(T) from the optical birefringence data. We observe that there is no discontinuous behavior in the optical birefringence, signaling the second-order nature of the N-SmA transition. The effect of the coupling between the nematic and smectic-A order parameters on the optical birefringence near the N-SmA transition is also discussed. In a temperature range of about 4K above and below the N-SmA transition, the pretransitional evidence for the N-SmA coupling have been detected. From the analysis of the optical birefringence data above and below the N-SmA transition by means of various fitting expressions we test the validity of the scaling relation λ=1-α between the critical exponent λ describing the limiting behavior of the nematic order parameter and the specific heat capacity exponent α. We then show that the temperature derivative of the nematic order parameter S(T) near T(NA) exhibits the same power-law divergence as the specific heat capacity with an effective critical exponent of 0.2303±0.0035.