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Nonseparable interactions and orientational phenomena in liquid crystals

University of British Columbia

Intermolecular interactions are anisotropic since they depend on the orientations of the interacting molecules. They are responsible for the orientational phase transitions observed in molecular systems. The effects of nonseparable interactions, which depend on both the molecular and intermolecular vector orientations, are investigated using Monte-Carlo simulations. It is found that for systems with quenched positional disorder, the nonseparability of the pair potential leads to orientational frustration. Expanding the pair potential in terms of its rotational invariants allows one to isolate random field terms whose presence are shown to be at the origin of the non-frustrated patches observed in such disordered systems. For liquid crystals, where translational and rotational degrees of freedom are in thermal equilibrium, Monte-Carlo results show that an ordering of the molecular orientations induces an ordering of the nearest-neighbor bond orientations only when the pair potential is nonseparable. These results suggest that it is necessary to reinterpret the mean-field theory of nematic liquid crystals as an approximation which neglects the presence of bond ordering in these systems. As well, they unravel the microscopic origin of the phenomeno-logical coupling between bond and molecular orientations invoked in Ginzburg-Landau theories of liquid crystals. The nonseparability of the intermolecular pair potential leads to a coupling between the nearest-neighbor bond orientational field and the molecular orientational field. It is shown that such coupling introduces new and interesting effects in liquid crystalline systems where interactions between the molecular and nearest-neighbor bond orientations are usually ignored.

Text

2011-01-12

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/30582

Physics

University of British Columbia

Graduate