Quantitative experimental determination of the Landau-potential of chiral enantiomer doped ferroelectric liquid crystals

The full Landau potential was determined for a ferroelectric liquid crystal doped with varying concentrations of the chiral dopant R1011 and its enantiomer S1011. A multi-curve fitting procedure using temperature and electric field dependent tilt angle and polarization data was employed to the generalized Landau model of ferroelectric liquid crystals. From this analysis the three Landau coefficients as well as the polarization-tilt coupling parameters were obtained as a function of dopant concentration and configuration. It is shown that the two most varied parameters are those of the first Landau coefficient α and the (chiral) linear polarization-tilt coupling constant C. The effect on the first Landau term is equivalent for the two dopants of opposite handedness indicating its achiral nature, while the effect on the (chiral) bilinear coupling term differs for the R1011 and S1011 dopant, increasing and decreasing the coupling between tilt and polarization respectively. This difference in the bilinear coupling term quantifiably evidences that the R1011 dopant increases and S1011 dopant reduces the inherent chirality in this system.