We argue that the possibility to observe a stable biaxial nematic phase in a binary mixture of prolate and oblate hard particles is seriously limited by the existence of entropydriven demixing. This result follows from a simple Onsager-type density functional theory. An important feature15 the coupling of the demixing mechanism to the orientational order of the system. The strength of this coup...

Density functional theory is applied to ion-induced nucleation of dipolar molecules. The predicted reversible work shows a sign preference, resulting in a difference in the nucleation rate by a factor of 10–10, for realistic values of model parameters. The sign effect is found to decrease systematically as the supersaturation is increased. The asymmetry of a molecule is shown to be directly res...