English

Field-induced structure transformation in electrorheological solids

Soft Condensed Matter 2016-08-31 v1 Materials Science

Abstract

We have computed the local electric field in a body-centered tetragonal (BCT) lattice of point dipoles via the Ewald-Kornfeld formulation, in an attempt to examine the effects of a structure transformation on the local field strength. For the ground state of an electrorheological solid of hard spheres, we identified a novel structure transformation from the BCT to the face-centered cubic (FCC) lattices by changing the uniaxial lattice constant c under the hard sphere constraint. In contrast to the previous results, the local field exhibits a non-monotonic transition from BCT to FCC. As c increases from the BCT ground state, the local field initially decreases rapidly towards the isotropic value at the body-centered cubic lattice, decreases further, reaching a minimum value and increases, passing through the isotropic value again at an intermediate lattice, reaches a maximum value and finally decreases to the FCC value. An experimental realization of the structure transformation is suggested. Moreover, the change in the local field can lead to a generalized Clausius-Mossotti equation for the BCT lattices.

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0105597,
  title  = {Field-induced structure transformation in electrorheological solids},
  author = {C. K. Lo and K. W. Yu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0105597},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

Submitted to Phys. Rev. E

R2 v1 2026-07-22T10:22:15.479Z