In a new study, researchers from the University of Leeds and their colleagues Natan Osterman, Alenka Mertelj, and Nerea Sebastian have revealed two previously undiscovered polar liquid states of matter. The research, published in Nature Communications, highlights the union of spontaneous symmetry breaking and emergent polar order, phenomena crucial to various scientific disciplines and the intriguing behavior of liquid crystals (LCs). The team discovered that these new phases have a lamellar structure with an inherent polar ordering of their constituent molecules. The first phase, termed SmCPH, exhibits polar order and a local tilted structure, with the tilt direction precessing around a helix orthogonal to the layer normal. This structure results in selective reflection of light. The second new phase, termed SmAAF, is anti-ferroelectric, with the molecules aligning orthogonally to the layer normal.
Furthermore, the researchers achieved room temperature ferroelectric nematic (NF) and SmCPH phases via binary mixture formulation of these novel materials with a standard NF compound. These mixtures have melting points (and/or glass transitions) significantly below ambient temperature. The newly discovered soft matter phases can be considered as electrical analogues of topological structures of magnetic spins in hard matter.
You can read the article here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50230-2