Hard colloidal rods near a soft wall: wetting, drying, and symmetry breaking

Abstract

Within an Onsager-like density functional theory we explore the thermodynamic and structural properties of an isotropic and nematic fluid of hard needle-like colloids in contact with a hard substrate coated with a soft short-ranged attractive or repulsive layer. As a function of the range and the strength of the soft interactions we find wetting and drying transitions, a pre-drying line, and a symmetry-breaking transition from uniaxial to biaxial in the wetting and drying film.

7 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Modeling planar degenerate wetting and anchoring in nematic liquid crystals
• The isotropic-nematic interface in suspensions of hard rods: Mean-field properties and capillary waves
• Free planar isotropic-nematic interfaces in binary hard-rod fluids
• Isotropic-nematic transition in hard-rod fluids: relation between continuous and restricted-orientation models