Collective dielectric processes at the transition temperature of the Sm-C^{*} and Sm-A^{*} phase in a ferroelectric liquid crystal.

Abstract

An anomalous dielectric relaxation process, called the partially unwound helical mode (p-UHM), is a collective dielectric process apart from the well known Goldstone and soft mode process; it is studied in the smectic C^{*} (Sm-C^{*}) phase and at the transition temperature of the Sm-C^{*}-Sm-A^{*} phase in the ferroelectric liquid crystal (FLC) material. To avoid the surface effect, a thick cell of 40 μm thickness was prepared with highly rubbed surfaces of the ITO substrates. It has been observed that the dielectric properties in Sm-C^{*} and at the T_{c} temperature are dominated by the p-UHM process which is dependent on an applied oscillating field in the Sm-C^{*} phase. The probing ac and dc bias field dependences of all these collective dielectric processes have been reported in the Sm-C^{*} and Sm-A^{*} phases of FLC materials.