Tilt, polarity, and spontaneous symmetry breaking in liquid crystals

We show through explicit molecular modeling how tilt may be induced in layered mesophases and propagate across the-layers, using a concrete representation of flexible tail-core-tail calamitic mesogens in conjunction with-the variational cluster expansion. The results demonstrate that spontaneous symmetry breaking observed in smectic-liquid crystals-the tilt of the director relative to the layers-can be induced by excluded. volume interactions, both in the synclinic and in the anticlinic configurations.