Document Type
Article
Date
2-3-2008
Keywords
condensed matter, soft condensed matter
Language
English
Official Citation
arXiv:cond-mat/0702662v2
Disciplines
Physics
Description/Abstract
We generalize our previous work on the phase stability and hydrodynamic of polar liquid crystals possessing local uniaxial
C1v-symmetry to biaxial systems exhibiting local C2v -symmetry. Our work is motivated by the recently discovered examples of thermotropic biaxial nematic liquid crystals comprising bent-core mesogens, whose molecular structure is characterized by a non-polar body axis (n) as well as a polar axis (p) along the bisector of the bent mesogenic core which is coincident with a large, transverse dipole moment. The free energy for this system differs from that of biaxial nematic liquid crystals in that it contains terms violating the p −p symmetry. We show that, in spite of a general splay instability associated with these parity-odd terms, a uniform polarized biaxial state can be stable in a range of parameters. We then derive the hydrodynamic equations of the system, via the Poisson-bracket formalism, in the polarized state and comment on the structure of the corresponding linear hydrodynamic modes. In our Poisson-bracket derivation, we also compute the flow-alignment parameters along the three symmetry axes in terms of microscopic parameters associated with the molecular geometry of the constituent biaxial mesogens.
Recommended Citation
Kung, William and Marchetti, M. Cristina, "Poisson-Bracket Approach to the Dynamics of Bent-Core Molecules" (2008). Physics - All Scholarship. 94.
https://surface.syr.edu/phy/94
Source
harvested from arXiv.org
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Additional Information
This manuscript is from arXiv.org, for more information see http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0702662