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Results of the first heat-capacity measurements of free-standing liquid-crystal films are presented. The nature of the smectic-A-hexatic-B transition of n-butyl-4^'-n-hexyloxybiphenyl-4-carboxylate (46OBC) has been studied for films from about ten to thousands of smectic layers thick. Convolution fitting of thick-film results has given values of the critical exponent and amplitude ratio consistent with bulk-sample fitting results. Thin-film heat-capacity anomalies are asymmetric in shape, in contrast to results for thick films.
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Pitchford et al. (1986) studied this question.
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