Energy landscape view of phase transitions and slow dynamics in thermotropic liquid crystals

Energy landscape view of phase transitions and slow dynamics in thermotropic liquid crystals.

Thermotropic liquid crystals are known to display rich phase behavior on temperature variation. Although the nematic phase is orientationally ordered but translationally disordered, a smectic phase is characterized by the appearance of a partial translational order in addition to a further increase in orientational order. In an attempt to understand the interplay between orientational and trans...

Phase transitions in liquid crystals

Thermotropic Ionic Liquid Crystals

The last five years' achievements in the synthesis and investigation of thermotropic ionic liquid crystals are reviewed. The present review describes the mesomorphic properties displayed by organic, as well as metal-containing ionic mesogens. In addition, a short overview on the ionic polymer and self-assembled liquid crystals is given. Potential and actual applications of ionic mesogens are al...

Thermotropic liquid crystals from biomacromolecules.

Complexation of biomacromolecules (e.g., nucleic acids, proteins, or viruses) with surfactants containing flexible alkyl tails, followed by dehydration, is shown to be a simple generic method for the production of thermotropic liquid crystals. The anhydrous smectic phases that result exhibit biomacromolecular sublayers intercalated between aliphatic hydrocarbon sublayers at or near room tempera...

Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena.phase Transitions in Liquid Crystals

The present text is the transcription of an introductory lecture discussing two phase transitions : nematic-isotropic and smectic A-nematic. The emphasis is on simple qualitative features, including Landau ~heories, coherence lengths and scaling properties.