Confinement and magnetic-field effect on chiral ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals in Grandjean-Cano wedge cells.

Abstract

We explore the structure and magnetic-field response of edge dislocations in Grandjean-Cano wedge cells filled with chiral mixtures of the ferroelectric nematic mesogen DIO. Upon cooling, the ordering changes from paraelectric in the cholesteric phase N^{*} to antiferroelectric in the smectic SmZ_{A}^{*} and to ferroelectric in the cholesteric N_{F}^{*}. Dislocations of the Burgers vector b equal to the helicoidal pitch P are stable in all three phases, while dislocations with b=P/2 exist only in the N^{*} and SmZ_{A}^{*}. The b=P/2 dislocations split into pairs of τ^{-1/2}λ^{+1/2} disclinations, while the thick dislocations b=P are pairs of nonsingular λ^{-1/2}λ^{+1/2} disclinations. The polar order makes the τ^{-1/2} disclinations unstable in the N_{F}^{*} phase, as they should be connected to singular walls in the polarization field. We propose a model of transformation of the composite τ^{-1/2} line-wall defect into a nonsingular λ^{-1/2} disclination, which is paired up with a λ^{+1/2} line to form a b=P dislocation. The SmZ_{A}^{*} behavior in the in-plane magnetic field is different from that of the N_{F}^{*} and N^{*}: the dislocations show no zigzag instability, and the pitch remains unchanged in the magnetic fields up to 1 T. The behavior is associated with the finite compressibility of smectic layers.