Chiral oily streaks in a smectic-A liquid crystal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The liquid crystal octylcyanobiphenyl (8CB) was doped with the chiral agent CB15 and spin-coated onto a substrate treated for planar alignment of the director, resulting in a film of thickness several hundred nm in the smectic-A phase. In both doped and undoped samples, the competing boundary conditions - planar alignment at the substrate and vertical alignment at the free surface - cause the liquid crystal to break into a series of flattened hemicylinders to satisfy the boundary conditions. When viewed under an optical microscope with crossed polarizers, this structure results in a series of dark and light stripes ("oily streaks") of period ∼1 μm. In the absence of chiral dopant the stripes run perpendicular to the substrate's easy axis. However, when doped with chiral CB15 at concentrations up to c = 4 wt%, the stripe orientation rotates by a temperature-dependent angle φ with respect to the c = 0 stripe orientation, where φ increases monotonically with c. φ is largest just below the nematic - smectic-A transition temperature TNA and decreases with decreasing temperature. As the temperature is lowered, φ relaxes to a steady-state orientation close to zero within ∼1 °C of TNA. We suggest that the rotation phenomenon is a manifestation of the surface electroclinic effect: The rotation is due to the weak smectic order parameter and resulting large director tilt susceptibility with respect to the smectic layer normal near TNA, in conjunction with an effective surface electric field due to polar interactions between the liquid crystal and substrate.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".