Elastic response of a nematic liquid crystal to an immersed nanowire

Abstract

We study the immersion of a ferromagnetic nanowire within a nematic liquid crystal using a lattice Boltzmann algorithm to solve the full three-dimensional equations of hydrodynamics. We present an algorithm for including a moving boundary, to simulate a nanowire, in a lattice Boltzmann simulation. The nematic imposes a torque on a wire that increases linearly with the angle between the wire and the equilibrium direction of the director field. By rotation of these nanowires, one can determine the elastic constants of the nematic.

10 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Lattice Boltzmann Simulations of Liquid Crystal Hydrodynamics
• Defect structures and torque on an elongated colloidal particle immersed in a liquid crystal host

Cited by in corpus (4)

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• Design of nematic liquid crystals to control microscale dynamics
• Hydrodynamic forces on steady and oscillating porous particles