Alignment of Hard Spherocylinders by Hard Spheres on Substrates

We performed Monte Carlo simulation of the system consisting of hard spheres, hard spherocylinders and a large hard plate. These elements were used to examine how substrates modified by adsorbed particles affect an alignment of liquid crystal molecules. In order to adsorb the hard spheres on the har...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Molecular Crystals and Liquid Crystals 2015-05, Vol.612 (1), p.24-32
Main Authors: Koda, Tomonori, Uchida, Makoto, Nishioka, Akihiro, Haba, Osamu, Yonetake, Koichiro, Kwak, Musun, Momoi, Yuichi, Kim, Nakwon, Hong, Sangpyo, Kang, Dongwoo, Choi, Youngseok
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Alignment
Computer simulation
Crystals
Drag (hindrance)
Fluids
Liquid crystals
Molecules
Monte Carlo methods
Monte Carlo simulation
Nematic
nematic phase
Spheres
substrate
Substrates
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We performed Monte Carlo simulation of the system consisting of hard spheres, hard spherocylinders and a large hard plate. These elements were used to examine how substrates modified by adsorbed particles affect an alignment of liquid crystal molecules. In order to adsorb the hard spheres on the hard plate, dragging potential for spheres were introduced. We prepared a homogeneous and a homeotropic alignment as an initial configuration of the simulations. Numbers and the size of adsorbed spheres were changed. Results showed that molecular alignment after relaxation depended on the initial configuration even for the same system parameters. We expect that the nematic phase of the present systems favor the homogeneous alignment. This is because we observed cases in which the homeotropic alignment was canceled after relaxation and we never observed cases in which the homogeneous alignment was canceled for the nematic phase of the present systems.
ISSN:1542-1406
1563-5287
1527-1943
DOI:10.1080/15421406.2015.1030572