Role of electrostatics in the texture of islands in free-standing ferroelectric liquid crystal films

Curved textures of ferroelectric smectic- C^* liquid crystals produce space charge when they involve divergence of the spontaneous polarization field. Impurity ions can partially screen this space charge, reducing long-range interactions to local ones. Through studies of the textures of islands on very thin free-standing smectic films, we see evidence of this effect, in which materials with a large spontaneous polarization have static structures described by a large effective bend elastic constant. To address this issue, we calculated the electrostatic free energy of a free-standing film of ferroelectric liquid crystal, showing how the screened Coulomb interaction contributes a term to the effective bend elastic constant, in the static long-wavelength limit. We report experiments which support the main features of this model.