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The current intense study of ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals wasinitiated by the observation of the same ferroelectric nematic phase in twoindependently discovered organic rod-shaped mesogenic compounds, RM734 and DIO.We recently reported that the compound RM734 also exhibits a monotropic,low-temperature, antiferroelectric phase having reentrant isotropic symmetry(the $I_A$ phase), the formation of which is facilitated to a remarkable degreeby doping with small (below $1\%$) amounts of the ionic liquid ${\rmBMIM-PF}_6$. Here we report similar phenomenology in DIO, showing that thisreentrant isotropic behavior is not only a property of RM734 but is rather amore general, material-independent feature of ferroelectric nematic mesogens.We find that the reentrant isotropic phases observed in RM734 and DIO aresimilar but not identical, adding two new phases to the ferroelectric nematicrealm. The two $I_A$ phases exhibit similar, strongly peaked, diffuse x-rayscattering in the WAXS range $(1<q<2 \, \AA^{-1})$ indicative of a distinctivemode of short-ranged, side-by-side molecular packing. The scattering of the$I_A$ phases at small $q$ is quite different in the two materials, however,with RM734 exhibiting a strong, single, diffuse peak at $q \sim 0.08 \,\AA^{-1}$ indicating mesoscale modulation with $\sim 80 \,\AA$ periodicity, andDIO a sharper diffuse peak at $q \sim 0.27 \,\AA ^{-1} \sim (2\pi/{\rmmolecular length})$, with second and third harmonics, indicating that in the$I_A$ phase of DIO, short-ranged molecular positional correlation is smecticlayer-like.

Thermotropic reentrant isotropy and antiferroelectricity in the ferroelectric nematic realm: Comparing RM734 and DIO