Enhancement by polydispersity of the biaxial nematic phase in a mixture of hard rods and plates

Abstract

The phase diagram of a polydisperse mixture of uniaxial rod-like and plate-like hard parallelepipeds is determined for aspect ratios $\kappa =5$ and 15. All particles have equal volume and polydispersity is introduced in a highly symmetric way. The corresponding binary mixture is known to have a biaxial phase for $\kappa =15$, but to be unstable against demixing into two uniaxial nematics for $\kappa =5$. We find that the phase diagram for $\kappa =15$ is qualitatively similar to that of the binary mixture, regardless the amount of polydispersity, while for $\kappa =5$ a sufficient amount of polydispersity stabilizes the biaxial phase. This provides some clues for the design of an experiment in which this long searched biaxial phase could be observed.

arXiv comment4 pages, 5 eps figure files, uses RevTeX 4 style

References in corpus (3)

• Predicting phase equilibria in polydisperse systems
• Dimensional crossover of the fundamental-measure functional for parallel hard cubes
• Phase equilibria in the polydisperse Zwanzig model of hard rods

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