Sandhya K L, Prasad S Krishna, Rao D S Shankar, Bahr Ch
Centre for Liquid Crystal Research, Jalahalli, Bangalore 560 013, India.
Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2002 Sep;66(3 Pt 1):031710. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.66.031710. Epub 2002 Sep 24.
Comparative x-ray and dielectric measurements have been made on a liquid crystal exhibiting a smectic-A-chiral-smectic-C (smectic-C*) transition in bulk and confined geometries. It is observed that confining the material in Anopore membranes having 200-nm pore size leads to the following features: (1) the temperature dependence of the x-ray layer spacing shows a qualitatively different behavior, (2) in the smectic-A phase the soft mode relaxation frequency increases by a factor of 2.5, and (3) in the smectic-C* phase the relaxation frequency of the Goldstone mode increases dramatically by as much as 400 times, perhaps owing to a partial unwinding of the helix by the surface induced field.
