Effective pair interactions between colloidal particles at a nematic-isotropic interface
Soft Condensed Matter
2015-06-24 v1
Abstract
The Landau-de Gennes free energy is used to study theoretically the interaction of parallel cylindrical colloidal particles trapped at a nematic-isotropic interface. We find that the effective interaction potential is non-monotonic. The corresponding force-distance curves exhibit jumps and hysteresis upon approach/separation due to the creation/annihilation of topological defects. Minimization results suggest a simple empirical pair potential for the effective colloid-colloid interaction at the interface. We propose that the interface-mediated interaction can play an important role in self-organization and clustering of colloidal particles at such interfaces.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0501573,
title = {Effective pair interactions between colloidal particles at a nematic-isotropic interface},
author = {D. Andrienko and M. Tasinkevych and S. Dietrich},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0501573},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
8 pages. 7 figures