2002/06/28 by Yuri Martı́nez-Ratón, Yuri Martinez-Raton, Jose A. Cuesta +1 · 2 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Liquid Crystal Research Advancements #Material Dynamics and Properties #Pickering emulsions and particle stabilization #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.89.185701
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 185701 (2002) · 4 pages, 5 eps figure files, uses RevTeX 4 style
arxiv created 2002/06/28 · openalex publication_date 2002/10/14 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The phase diagram of a polydisperse mixture of uniaxial rodlike and platelike hard parallelepipeds is determined for aspect ratios kappa=5 and 15. All particles have equal volume, and polydispersity is introduced in a highly symmetric way. The corresponding binary mixture is known to have a biaxial phase for kappa=15, but to be unstable against demixing into two uniaxial nematics for kappa=5. The phase diagram for kappa=15 is qualitatively similar to that of the binary mixture, regardless of the amount of polydispersity, while for kappa=5 a sufficient amount of polydispersity stabilizes the biaxial phase. This provides clues for designing an experiment to observe this long searched biaxial phase.