Dynamics of smectic liquid crystals.

Another extension of our work on smectic liquid crystals is to the treatment of non-equilibrium phenomena. In one study, we have used a continuum hydrodynamic theory to calculate the time-dependent density-density correlation functions in both smectic-A and crystalline smectic-B phases, and applied the results to analyzing x-ray scattering intensities in those phases (see details). In other work, a time-dependent Landau-Ginzburg approach has been used to study the dynamics of nucleating dislocation loops in overheated free-standing smectic films, generalizing the analysis of layer-thinning transitions described in topic 1 above (see details).