Electrostatic Interlayer Interactions in Tilted Polar Smectic Liquid Crystals

In chiral tilted smectic phases transverse molecular dipoles within a smectic layer order polarly as well as quadrupolarly. Electrostatic dipolar and quadrupolar interactions vanish between two smectic layers without positiorial correlations of molecules and exist only when the positions of molecules in the two layers are correlated. Therefore the interlayer electrostatic intcractions are of short range and are expected to act only between nearest and next nearest layers. Dipolar interactions prefer antiferroelectric ordering of the tilt vectors in the two layers, while the quadrupolar interactions favour to have the tilt vectors in the two layers in two perpendicular directions.