Abstract
Recently, liquid crystalline elastomers composed of chiral mesogens have attracted both industrial and scientific interests because of their physical properties such as, pyroelectricity, ferroelectricity, and piezoelectricity owing to their local symmetry. It is worthwhile to notice that they are ideal materials for the investigation of piezoelectric effects in chiral smectic systems, because the polymer network prevents macroscopic flow which disturbs the emergence of piezoelectricity in the conventional low-molar mass ferroelectric liquid crystals. On the other hand, nanometer sized diamonds, designated as "nanodiamond", has been paid an increasing attention as a novel class of piezoelectric fillers because of the good dispensability owing to their surface electric charge. In this study, chiral smectic elastomers filled with nanometer sized diamonds are prepared, and the mesogenic alignments and the phase transition behavior are investigated. In addition, the spontaneous deformation responsible to re-alignments of mesogens in a heating and cooling process containing the SmA-Iso phase transition is discussed.
