Dielectric pretransitional effects in the isotropic phase of chiral liquid crystals

摘要

We have performed dielectric measurements on chiral liquid crystalline systems. From the values of the static dielectric permittivity, it is observed that the dielectric pretransitional effect in the isotropic phase on approaching the isotropic to cholesteric or isotropic to blue phase transition is virtually not influenced by the chirality of the system. The relaxation times do not show anomalous behaviour near the transition, although a small overall slowing down is observed in mixtures with increasing chirality.