Visualization, coarsening and flow dynamics of focal conic domains in simulated Smectic-A liquid crystals

Abstract

Smectic liquid crystals vividly illustrate the subtle interplay of broken translational and orientational symmetries, by exhibiting defect structures forming geometrically perfect confocal ellipses and hyperbolas. Here, we develop and numerically implement an effective theory to study the dynamics of focal conic domains in smectic-A liquid crystals. We use the information about the smectic's structure and energy density provided by our simulations to develop several novel visualization tools for the focal conics. Our simulations accurately describe both simple and extensional shear, which we compare to experiments, and provide additional insight into the coarsening dynamics of focal conic domains.

10 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (2)

• A multi-axis confocal rheoscope for studying shear flow of structured fluids
• The Power of Poincaré: Elucidating the Hidden Symmetries in Focal Conic Domains

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Structural Landscapes in Geometrically Frustrated Smectics
• Complex-tensor theory of simple smectics
• The weirdest martensite: Smectic liquid crystal microstructure and Weyl-Poincaré invariance
• Smectic Layering: Landau theory for a complex-tensor order parameter
• Equilibrium phases and domain growth kinetics of calamitic liquid crystals