Related papers: Thermotropic Biaxial Nematics: Spontaneous or Fiel…
We study the symmetry and the spatial uniformity of orientational order of the biaxial nematic phase in the light of recent experimental observations of phase biaxiality in thermotropic bent-core and calamitic-tetramer nematics. We present…
Recent experiments report that the long looked for thermotropic biaxial nematic phase has been finally detected in some thermotropic liquid crystalline systems. Inspired by these experimental observations we concentrate on some elementary…
The possible symmetries of the biaxial nematic phase are examined against the implications of the presently available experimental results. Contrary to the widespread notion that biaxial nematics have orthorhombic symmetry, our study shows…
Nematic liquid crystals possess three different phases: isotropic, uniaxial, and biaxial. The ground state of most nematics is either isotropic or uniaxial, depending on the external temperature. Nevertheless, biaxial domains have been…
We use density-functional theory, of the fundamental-measure type, to study the relative stability of the biaxial nematic phase, with respect to non-uniform phases such as smectic and columnar, in fluids made of hard board-like particles…
Thermotropic biaxial nematic phases seem to be rare, but biaxial smectic A phases less so. Here we use molecular field theory to study a simple two-parameter model, with one parameter promoting a biaxial phase and the second promoting…
We investigate the phase behavior of colloidal suspensions of board-like particles under the effect of an external field and assess the still disputed occurrence of the biaxial nematic (N$_\text{B}$) liquid crystal phase. The external field…
Ultracold dipolar Fermi gases represent relatively unexplored, strongly correlated systems arising from long-range and anisotropic interactions. We demonstrate the possibility of a spontaneous symmetry breaking biaxial phase in these…
A simple model is proposed for nematogenic molecules that favor perpendicular orientations as well as parallel ones. (Charged rods, for example, show this antagonistic tendency.) When a small disorienting field is applied along $z$, a low…
Only a few years have passed since discovery of polar nematics, and now they are becoming the most actively studied liquid crystal materials. Despite numerous breakthrough findings made recently, a theoretical systematization is still…
A material showing a sequence of three ferroelectric liquid crystalline phases below the paraelectric nematic phase has been synthesized and studied. The polar order of molecules appearing due to the dipole-dipole interactions in the NF…
We study a class of models for \sbentcore molecules using low density version of Local Density Functional Theory. Arms of the molecules are modeled using two- and three Gay-Berne (GB) interacting units of uniaxial and biaxial symmetry.…
We study a minimal model of a system with coexisting nematic and polar orientational orders, where one field tends to order and the other prefers isotropy. For strong coupling, the ordered field aligns the isotropic one, locking their…
We use a continuum, two-fluid approach to study a mixture of two active nematic fluids. Even in the absence of thermodynamically-driven ordering, for mixtures of different activities we observe turbulent microphase separation, where domains…
We have calculated the phase diagrams of one--component fluids made of five types of biaxial particles differing in their cross sections. The orientation of the principal particle axis is fixed in space, while the second axis is allowed to…
Both uniaxial and biaxial nematic liquid crystals are defined by orientational ordering of their building blocks. While uniaxial nematics only orient the long molecular axis, biaxial order implies local order along three axes. As the…
We explore the phase behavior and structure of orthogonal smectic liquid crystals consisting of bent-core molecules (BCMs) by means of Monte Carlo molecular simulations. A simple athermal molecular model is introduced that describes the…
The biaxial phase in nematic liquid crystals has been elusive for several decades after its prediction in the 1970s. A recent experimental breakthrough was achieved by Liu et al. [PNAS 113, 10479 (2016)] in a liquid crystalline medium with…
Following the groundbreaking discovery of the ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal phase (NF), a series of closely-related new polar phases have also been found. An especially interesting one is the ferroelectric smectic A phase (SmAF) with…
We employ a lattice-gas extension of the Maier--Saupe model with discrete orientation states to study the phase behavior of a statistical model for biaxial nematogenic units in mean-field theory. The phase behavior of the system is…