Isotropic-nematic interfacial tension of hard and soft rods: application of advanced grand canonical biased sampling techniques

Abstract

Coexistence between the isotropic and the nematic phase in suspensions of rods is studied using grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations with a bias on the nematic order parameter. The biasing scheme makes it possible to estimate the interfacial tension gamma in systems of hard and soft rods. For hard rods with L/D=15, we obtain gamma ~ 1.4 kB T/L^2, with L the rod length, D the rod diameter, T the temperature, and kB the Boltzmann constant. This estimate is in good agreement with theoretical predictions, and the order of magnitude is consistent with experiments.

10 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (3)

• The fluid-fluid interface in a model colloid-polymer mixture: Application of grand canonical Monte Carlo to asymmetric binary mixtures
• Interfacial tension of the isotropic--nematic interface in suspensions of soft spherocylinders
• Free planar isotropic-nematic interfaces in binary hard-rod fluids

Cited by in corpus (4)

• The isotropic-nematic interface in suspensions of hard rods: Mean-field properties and capillary waves
• Depletion induced isotropic-isotropic phase separation in suspensions of rod-like colloids
• The isotropic-nematic transition for hard rods on a three--dimensional (3D) cubic lattice
• Surface tension of isotropic-nematic interfaces: Fundamental Measure Theory for hard spherocylinders