Coarsening Dynamics of Biaxial Nematic Liquid Crystals

Abstract

We study the coarsening dynamics of two and three dimensional biaxial nematic liquid crystals, using Langevin dynamics. Unlike previous work, we use a model with no a priori relationship among the three elastic constants associated with director deformations. We find a rich variety of coarsening behavior, including the simulataneous decay of nearly equal populations of the three classes of half-integer disclination lines. The behavior we observed can be understood on the basis of the relative values of the elastic constants and the resulting decay channels of the defects.

6 pages, 4 figures Web reference added for animations: http://www.egr.msu.edu/~priezjev/biaxial/biaxial.html

References in corpus (1)

• Disclination loop behavior near the nematic-isotropic transition

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