Effect of magnetic nanoparticles on the nematic-smectic-A phase transition

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
Divisions: College of Engineering & Physical 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
Publication ISSN: 1873-3166
Last Modified: 19 Feb 2024 08:15
Date Deposited: 01 Aug 2017 13:40
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2017-09
Published Online Date: 2017-07-18
Accepted Date: 2017-07-15
Submitted Date: 2017-05-24
Authors: Mukherjee, Prabir K.
Chattopadhyay, Amit K. (ORCID Profile 0000-0001-5499-6008)

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