2017/05/24 by Prabir K. Mukherjee, Mukherjee, Prabir K, Amit K. Chattopadhyay +1
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Liquid Crystal Research Advancements #Material Dynamics and Properties #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #Theoretical and Computational Physics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1705.08702
openalex publication_date 2017/05/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Recent experiments on mixed liquid crystals have highlighted the hugely\nsignificant role of ferromagnetic nanoparticle impurities in defining the\nnematic-smectic-A phase transition point. Structured around a Flory-Huggins\nfree energy of isotropic mixing and Landau-de Gennes free energy, this article\npresents a phenomenological mean-field model that quantifies the role of such\nimpurities in analyzing thermodynamic phases, in a mixture of thermotropic\nsmectic liquid crystal and ferromagnetic nanoparticles. First we discuss the\nimpact of ferromagnetic nanoparticles on the isotropic-ferronematic and\nferronematic-ferrosmectic phase transitions and their transition temperatures.\nThis is followed by analysis of various topologies in the phase diagrams. Our\nmodel results indicate that there exists a critical concentration of\nnanoparticle impurities for which the second order N-SmA transition becomes\nfirst order at a tricritical point. Calculations based on this model show\nremarkable agreement with experiment.\n