Ferroelectric Liquid Crystals

In the preceding chapters we have dealt with the phenomena associated with the origination of a spontaneous polarization in crystalline media. The basic mechanisms leading to ferroelectricity involved spontaneous displacements of charged particles in unit cells or redistributions of the probabilities of their localization at certain positions. A characteristic feature of such transitions is the change of the crystal symmetry into a group with a special polar direction, with the original and polar phases belonging to one of the 32 discrete crystallographic groups.