Enhancement by polydispersity of the biaxial nematic phase in a mixture of hard rods and plates

Details Enhancement by polydispersity of the biaxial nematic phase in a mixture of hard rods and plates Enhancement by polydispersity of the biaxial nematic phase in a mixture of hard rods and plates

2002-06-28

arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0206576v1

Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 185701 (2002)

Physics

Condensed Matter

Soft Condensed Matter

4 pages, 5 eps figure files, uses RevTeX 4 style

Scientific paper

10.1103/PhysRevLett.89.185701

The phase diagram of a polydisperse mixture of uniaxial rod-like and plate-like 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 $\kappa=5$. We find that the phase diagram for $\kappa=15$ is qualitatively similar to that of the binary mixture, regardless the amount of polydispersity, while for $\kappa=5$ a sufficient amount of polydispersity stabilizes the biaxial phase. This provides some clues for the design of an experiment in which this long searched biaxial phase could be observed.

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