George, S., Bentham, C., Zeng, X. et al. (2 more authors) (2017) Monte Carlo study of the ordering in a strongly frustrated liquid crystal. PHYSICAL REVIEW E, 95 (6). 062126. ISSN 2470-0045
Abstract
We have performed Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the temperature dependence of the ordering of the side chains of the X -shaped liquid crystal molecules which are arranged in a hexagonal array. Each hexagon contains six side chains, one from each side of the hexagon. Each liquid crystal molecule has two, dissimilar, side chains, one that contains silicon and one that contains fluorine. Like chains attract each other more strongly than unlike chains and this drives an order-disorder transition. The system is frustrated because it is not possible to find a configuration in which all the hexagons are occupied by either all silicon or all fluorine chains. There are two phase transitions. If only pairwise interactions are included it is found that there is an interesting fluctuating phase between the disordered phase and the fully ordered ground state. This did not agree with the experiments where an intermediate phase was seen that had long range order on one of the three sublattices. Agreement was found when the calculations were modified to include attractive three-body interactions between the silicon chains.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Materials Science and Engineering (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number LEVERHULME TRUST (THE) EM-2012-089/4 LEVERHULME TRUST (THE) RPG-2012-804 ENGINEERING AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL (EPSRC) EP/K034308/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 19 Jul 2017 08:45 |
Last Modified: | 23 Jun 2023 22:32 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.95.062126 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | American Physical Society |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1103/PhysRevE.95.062126 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:119070 |