Depletion-induced biaxial nematic states of boardlike particles

Abstract

With the aim of investigating the stability conditions of biaxial nematic liquid crystals, we study the effect of adding a non-adsorbing ideal depletant on the phase behavior of colloidal hard boardlike particles. We take into account the presence of the depletant by introducing an effective depletion attraction between a pair of boardlike particles. At fixed depletant fugacity, the stable liquid crystal phase is determined through a mean-field theory with restricted orientations. Interestingly, we predict that for slightly elongated boardlike particles a critical depletant density exists, where the system undergoes a direct transition from an isotropic liquid to a biaxial nematic phase. As a consequence, by tuning the depletant density, an easy experimental control parameter, one can stabilize states of high biaxial nematic order even when these states are unstable for pure systems of boardlike particles.

References in corpus (8)

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Dynamics of Uniaxial-to-Biaxial Nematics Switching in Suspensions of Hard Cuboids
• Isotropic-nematic transition in a mixture of hard spheres and hard spherocylinders: scaled particle theory description
• Depletion interaction between two ellipsoids
• Self-assembly and entropic effects in pear-shaped colloid systems: I. Shape sensitivity of bilayer phases in colloidal pear-shaped particle systems
• Biaxial nematic order in fundamental measure theory
• Self-assembly and entropic effects in pear-shaped colloid systems: II. Depletion attraction of pear-shaped particles in a hard sphere solvent
• Dynamics of Colloidal Cubes and Cuboids in Cylindrical Nanopores
• Biaxial Nematics of Hard Cuboids in an External Field