Hysteresis and Fréedericksz thresholds for twisted states in chiral nematic liquid crystals: Minimum-energy path approach

We study minimum-energy pathways (MEPs) between the branches of metastable helical structures in chiral nematic liquid crystals (CNLCs) subjected to the electric field applied across the cell. By performing stability analysis we have found that, for the branches with non-vanishing half-turn number, the threshold (critical) voltage of the Fréedericksz transition is an increasing function of the free twisting wave number. The curves for the threshold voltage depend on the elastic anisotropy and determine the zero-field critical free twisting number where the director out-of-plane fluctuations destabilize the CNLC helix. For each MEP passing through a first order saddle point we have computed the energy barrier as the energy difference between the saddle-point and the initial structures at different values of the applied field. In our calculations, where the initial approximation for a MEP at the next step was determined by the MEP obtained at the previous step, the electric field dependence of the energy barrier is found to exhibit the hysteresis. This is the hysteresis of electrically driven transition of the saddle-point configuration between the planar and the tilted structures involving out-of-plane director deformations. It turned out that, by contrast to the second-order Fréedericksz transition, this transition is first order and we have studied how it depends on the zenithal anchoring energy strength.