2014/06/30 by Alfredo Metere, Tomas Oppelstrup, Metere, Alfredo +5
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Biocrusts and Microbial Ecology #FOS: Physical sciences #Liquid Crystal Research Advancements #Pickering emulsions and particle stabilization #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1406.7804
Re-Submitted #2 to J. Chem. Phys
openalex publication_date 2014/06/30 · arxiv created 2015/03/18 · arxiv updated 2015/03/20 · openalex created_date 2022/10/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We report a molecular dynamics simulation demonstrating that a columnar liquid crystal, commonly formed by disc-shaped molecules, can be formed by identical particles interacting via a spherically symmetric potential. Upon isochoric cooling from a low-density isotropic liquid state the simulated system performed a weak first order phase transition which produced a liquid crystal phase composed of parallel particle columns arranged in a hexagonal pattern in the plane perpendicular to the column axis. The particles within columns formed a liquid structure and demonstrated a significant intracolumn diffusion. Further cooling resulted in another first-order transition whereby the column structure became periodically ordered in three dimensions transforming the liquid-crystal phase into a crystal. This result is the first observation of a liquid crystal formation in a simple one-component system of particles. Its conceptual significance is in that it demonstrated that liquid crystals that have so far only been produced in systems of anisometric molecules, can also be formed by mesoscopic soft-matter and colloidal systems of spherical particles with appropriately tuned interatomic potential.