Pressure stiffens the medium

Prasad N. Bapat, D.S. Shankar Rao, S. Krishna Prasad and U. S. Hiremath,
Thermochimica Acta, 537, 65 (10 June 2012)

We report the first systematic work on the effect of hydrostatic pressure on the splay and bend elastic constants of a nematic (N) liquid crystal. At a relative temperature, the magnitudes of both the elastic constants increase significantly with increasing pressure, with the variation for the bend parameter being slightly higher. Pressure also influences the rate at which the elastic constants grow as the smectic A(SmA) phase is approached from the N phase. The studies further show that the temperature range of the N phase may not play an important role in the increase of the splay constant near the transition to the SmA phase.