Equivalent variational approaches to biaxial liquid crystal dynamics

Equivalent Theories of Liquid Crystal Dynamics

There are two competing descriptions of nematic liquid crystal dynamics: the Ericksen-Leslie director theory and the Eringen micropolar approach. Up to this day, these two descriptions have remained distinct in spite of several attempts to show that the micropolar theory includes the director theory. In this paper we show that this is the case by using symmetry reduction techniques and introduc...

Biaxial liquid-crystal elastomers: a lattice model.

We present a simple coarse-grained lattice model for monodomain biaxial liquid-crystal elastomers and perform large-scale Monte Carlo simulations in the proposed model system. Orientational ordering--uniaxial or biaxial--reflects in sample deformations on cooling the system. The simulation output is used to predict calorimetry data and deuterium magnetic resonance spectra.

Coarsening dynamics of biaxial nematic liquid crystals.

We study the coarsening dynamics of two- and three-dimensional biaxial nematic liquid crystals, using Langevin dynamics. Unlike previous work, we use a model with no a priori relationship among the three elastic constants associated with director deformations. Biaxial nematics possess four topologically distinct classes of defects, three of which have half-integer charge, while the fourth, whic...

Atomistic simulations of a thermotropic biaxial liquid crystal.

We have performed molecular dynamics simulations of a 2,5-bis-(p-hydroxyphenyl)-1,3,4-oxadiazole mesogen (ODBP-Ph-C(7)) at a fully atomistic level for a range of temperatures within the region that has experimentally been assigned to a biaxial nematic phase. Analysis of the data shows that the simulated nematic phase is biaxial but that the degree of biaxiality is small. The simulations show al...

Rotational diffusion of biaxial probes in biaxial liquid crystal phases, Mol. Phys., 85, 299-333 (1995)