Hard-body models of bulk liquid crystals

Hard-body models of bulk liquid crystals.

Hard models for particle interactions have played a crucial role in the understanding of the structure of condensed matter. In particular, they help to explain the formation of oriented phases in liquids made of anisotropic molecules or colloidal particles and continue to be of great interest in the formulation of theories for liquids in bulk, near interfaces and in biophysical environments. Ha...

Substrate-induced bulk alignment of liquid crystals.

Heterogeneous dynamics in columnar liquid crystals of parallel hard rods.

In the wake of previous studies on the rattling-and-jumping diffusion in smectic liquid crystal phases of colloidal rods, we analyze here for the first time the heterogeneous dynamics in columnar phases. More specifically, we perform computer simulations to investigate the relaxation dynamics of a binary mixture of perfectly aligned hard spherocylinders. We detect that the columnar arrangement ...

Bulk and surface biaxiality in nematic liquid crystals.

Nematic liquid crystals possess three different phases: isotropic, uniaxial, and biaxial. The ground state of most nematics is either isotropic or uniaxial, depending on the external temperature. Nevertheless, biaxial domains have been frequently identified, especially close to defects or external surfaces. In this paper we show that any spatially varying director pattern may be a source of bia...

Liquid Crystal Lattice Models I. Bulk Systems

Monte Carlo simulations of spin models for liquid crystal bulk systems are described. A concise description of second rank Lebwohl-Lasher models of various dimensionality and of models containing in addition interactions of first and fourth rank is provided. Biaxial lattice models are also briefly discussed.