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Formation And Development Of Nanometer-Sized Cybotactic Clusters In Bent-Core Nematic Liquid Crystalline Compounds, Yuri Panarin, Sithara P. Sreenilayam, Jagdish K. Vij, Anne Lehmann, Carsten Tschierske

Articles

Two homologue achiral bent-core liquid crystals (LCs), BCN66 and BCN84, in their nematic phases are studied by dielectric spectroscopy in the frequency range 10 Hz–10 MHz. In each of these compounds, two relaxation processes are identified and assigned to (i) collective dynamics of molecules in nanometer-sized cybotactic clusters and (ii) individual molecular relaxations, in the ascending order of frequency of the probe field. The temperature and the bias electric field dependence of the dielectric strength and relaxation frequency for these processes are shown to give rise to sharpness in cluster boundaries, increased size and volume fraction in the LC nematic …