2011/12/19 by Jun Geng, Thanh‐Son Nguyen, Jonathan V. Selinger +1 · 44 citations
Chemistry · Materials Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Chemical physics #Chemistry #Composite material #Condensed matter physics #Coupling (piping) #Curvature #Geology #Geometry #Liquid Crystal Research Advancements #Liquid crystal #Materials science #Mathematics #Membrane #Micro and Nano Robotics #Order (exchange) #Particle (ecology) #Physics #Plane (geometry) #Surfactants and Colloidal Systems #Tangent #Vesicle #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1039/c3sm50489a
published in Soft Matter 9(34), 8314 (Royal Society of Chemistry) · 4 pages, including 24 pdf figures, uses REVTeX 4.1 and PDFLaTeX
arxiv created 2011/12/19 · openalex publication_date 2013/01/01 · arxiv updated 2013/08/14 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In membranes with nematic liquid-crystalline order, there is a geometric coupling between the nematic director and the shape: nonuniformity in the director induces curvature, and curvature provides an effective potential acting on the director. For a closed vesicle, there must be a total topological charge of +2, which normally occurs as four defects of charge +1/2 each. Previous research has suggested that these four defects will form a regular tetrahedron, leading to a tetrahedral shape of the vesicle, which may be useful in designing colloidal particles for photonic applications. Here, we use three approaches to investigate the behavior of a nematic vesicle: particle-based simulation, spherical harmonic expansion, and finite-element modeling. When liquid crystal has a purely 2D intrinsic interaction, we find that the perfect tetrahedral shape is stable over a wide range of parameters. However, when it has a 3D intrinsic and extrinsic interaction, the perfect tetrahedral shape is never stable; the vesicle is a distorted tetrahedron for small Frank constant and a highly elongated rectangle for larger Frank constant. These results show the difficulty in designing tetrahedral structures for photonic crystals.