Experimental Realization of an Incompressible Newtonian Fluid in Two Dimensions

Abstract

The Brownian diffusion of micron-scale inclusions in freely suspended smectic A liquid crystal films a few nanometers thick and several millimeters in diameter depends strongly on the air surrounding the film. Near atmospheric pressure, the three-dimensionally coupled film/gas system is well described by Hughes/Pailthorpe/White hydrodynamic theory but at lower pressure (p < 70 torr), the diffusion coefficient increases substantially, tending in high vacuum toward the two-dimensional limit where it is determined by film size. In the absence of air, the films are found to be a nearly ideal physical realization of a two-dimensional, incompressible Newtonian fluid.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Simple Viscous Flows: from Boundary Layers to the Renormalization Group
• Liquid crystal films as on-demand, variable thickness (50-5000 nm) targets for intense lasers
• Mutual diffusion of inclusions in freely-suspended smectic liquid crystal films
• Textural transformations in islands on free standing Smectic C* liquid crystal films

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Realization of hydrodynamic experiments on quasi-2D liquid crystal films in microgravity
• Coalescence of Islands in Freely-Suspended Smectic Films
• Hydrodynamic fluctuations in quasi-two dimensional diffusion
• Detection of Islands and Droplets on Smectic Films Using Machine Learning
• Topological defect coarsening in quenched smectic-C films analyzed using artificial neural networks
• Acoustic streaming in 2D freely suspended smectic liquid crystal film
• Circulating Marangoni flows within droplets in smectic films