Liquid crystals and ferroelectrics
How do rod- or disk-shaped molecules self-organize into the partially ordered liquid-crystal phases, and what microscopic physics produces ferroelectric materials with a switchable spontaneous electric polarization?
History and references
Partly settled. Some of it is understood, some is still argued about.
Ginzburg's problem #8 combined liquid crystals and ferroelectricity. Liquid-crystal physics underpins the mature LCD display industry, and classic ferroelectrics (like barium titanate) are textbook material, but new phenomena keep appearing: a genuinely new phase, the ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal, was discovered only in 2017-2021, and hafnia-based ferroelectrics are now pursued for computer memory. There is no single moment at which this broad, still-active field could be called 'solved.'
Somewhere between the rigid order of a crystal and the disorder of a liquid, molecules find a whole zoo of partly ordered phases, and some of them remember which way an electric field once pointed.
References
- What problems of physics and astrophysics seem now to be especially important and interesting (thirty years later, already on the verge of the XXI century)?, V L Ginzburg, Physics-Uspekhi 42 (4) 353-373, 1999
- Ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals, R. J. Mandle, S. J. Cowling, J. W. Goodby, Nature Communications 12, 4962, 2021
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