High-resolution calorimetric study of phase transitions in chiral smectic-<mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><mml:mi>C</mml:mi></mml:math>liquid crystalline phases

We carried out an improved characterization of phase transitions among chiral smectic-Csubphases observed for various antiferroelectric liquid crystals by precise heat capacity measurements. It was found that the phase transitions are intrinsically first order exhibiting a remarkable heat anomaly which involves little pretransitional thermal fluctuation and a finite thermal hysteresis. On the other hand, we also noticed that the critical...