Biaxial potential of surface-stabilized ferroelectric liquid crystals.

A biaxial surface potential Φ_{s} of smectic-C^{*} surface-stabilized ferroelectric liquid crystals (SSFLCs) is introduced in this paper to explain the experimentally observed electric-field dependence of polarization P[over ̃]_{cell}(E), in particular the shape of the static hysteresis loops. Our potential consists of three independent parts. The first nonpolar part Φ_{n} describes the deviation of the prime director n (which is the most probable orientation of the long molecular axes) from the easy alignment axis R, which is located in the boundary surface plane.