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

Prabir K. Mukherjee*, Amit K. Chattopadhyay

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    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.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)612-617
    Number of pages6
    JournalJournal of Molecular Liquids
    Volume242
    Early online date18 Jul 2017
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Sept 2017

    Bibliographical note

    © 2017, Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

    Keywords

    • liquid crystals
    • nanoparticles
    • phase transition

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