Abstract
Recent experiments on mixed liquid crystals have highlighted the hugely significant role of ferromagnetic nanoparticle impurities in defining the nematic-smectic-A phase transition point. Structured around a Flory-Huggins free energy of isotropic mixing and Landau-de Gennes free energy, this article presents a phenomenological mean-field model that quantifies the role of such impurities in analyzing thermodynamic phases, in a mixture of thermotropic smectic liquid crystal and ferromagnetic nanoparticles. First we discuss the impact of ferromagnetic nanoparticles on the isotropic-ferronematic and ferronematic-ferrosmectic phase transitions and their transition temperatures. This is followed by plotting and discussing various topologies in the phase diagrams. Our model results indicate that there exists a critical concentration of nanoparticle impurities for which the second order N-SmA transition becomes first order at a tricritical point. Calculations based on this model show remarkable agreement with experiment.
Publication DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molliq.2017.07.056 |
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Divisions: | Engineering & Applied Sciences > Mathematics Engineering & Applied Sciences > Systems analytics research institute (SARI) |
Additional Information: | © 2017, Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
Uncontrolled Keywords: | liquid crystals,nanoparticles,phase transition,Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials,Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics,Condensed Matter Physics,Spectroscopy,Physical and Theoretical Chemistry,Materials Chemistry |
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Related URLs: |
http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85025173447&partnerID=8YFLogxK
(Scopus URL) |
Published Date: | 2017-09 |
Authors: |
Mukherjee, Prabir K.
Chattopadhyay, Amit K. |
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Version: Accepted Version
License: Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives
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