Connectivity, Not Density, Dictates Percolation in Nematic Liquid Crystals of Slender Nanoparticles
arXiv:1903.02437 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.097801
Abstract
We show by means of continuum theory and simulations that geometric percolation in uniaxial nematics of hard slender particles is fundamentally different from that in isotropic dispersions. In the nematic, percolation depends only very weakly on the density and is, in essence, determined by a distance criterion that defines connectivity. This unexpected finding has its roots in the non-trivial coupling between the density and the degree of orientational order that dictate the mean number of particle contacts. Clusters in the nematic are much longer than wide, suggesting the use of nematics for nanocomposites with strongly anisotropic transport properties.
References in corpus (6)
- Depletion-induced percolation in networks of nanorods
- Quasiuniversal connectedness percolation of polydisperse rod systems
- Interfacial tension of the isotropic--nematic interface in suspensions of soft spherocylinders
- Hopping conductivity of a suspension of nanowires in an insulator
- Continuum Percolation of Polydisperse Rods in Quadrupole Fields: Theory and Simulations
- Connectedness percolation of hard deformed rods