Heterogeneous Dynamics in Columnar Liquid Crystals of Parallel Hard Rods
arXiv:1009.0360 · doi:10.1063/1.3505150
Abstract
In the wake of previous studies on the rattling-and-jumping diffusion in smectic liquid crystal phases of colloidal rods, we analyze here for the first time the heterogeneous dynamics in columnar phases. More specifically, we perform computer simulations to investigate the relaxation dynamics of a binary mixture of perfectly aligned hard spherocylinders. We detect that the columnar arrangement of the system produces free-energy barriers the particles should overcome to jump from one column to another, thus determining a hopping-type diffusion. This phenomenon accounts for the non-Gaussian inter-column diffusion and shows a two-step structural relaxation which is remarkably analogous to that of out-of-equilibrium glass-forming systems and gels. Surprisingly enough, slight deviations from the behavior of simple liquids due to transient cages is also observed in the direction perpendicular to this plane, where the system is usually referred to as liquid-like.
accepted by J Chem Phys; 10 pages, 10 figures
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Cited by in corpus (6)
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- Dynamic Monte Carlo Simulations of Anisotropic Colloids
- Speeding up dynamics by tuning the non-commensurate size of rod-like particles in a smectic phase
- Dynamics of Hard Colloidal Cuboids in Nematic Liquid Crystals
- Long-time relaxation dynamics in nematic and smectic liquid crystals of soft-repulsive colloidal rods