Spontaneous Layer Twist in a Stripe Texture of Chiral Ferroelectric Smectics Observed by Synchrotron X-Ray Microdiffraction

We noticed stripe domains accompanied with a zigzag defect loop, which cannot be explained as simple zigzag walls. The structure was analyzed using a synchrotron X-ray microbeam with a space resolution of 5×5 µ m2. We propose that the structure is a chevron structure with a spontaneous layer twist, which is predicted to exist by the continuum theory but has not yet been observed experimentally.