Enhancement by polydispersity of the biaxial nematic phase in a mixture of hard rods and plates |
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Authors: | Martínez-Ratón Yuri Cuesta José A |
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Affiliation: | Grupo Interdisciplinar de Sistemas Complicados (GISC), Departamento de Matemáticas, Unversidad Carlos III de Madrid, Avenida de la Universidad, 30, E-28911, Leganés, Madrid, Spain. yuri@math.uc3m.es |
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Abstract: | The phase diagram of a polydisperse mixture of uniaxial rodlike and platelike hard parallelepipeds is determined for aspect ratios kappa=5 and 15. All particles have equal volume, and polydispersity is introduced in a highly symmetric way. The corresponding binary mixture is known to have a biaxial phase for kappa=15, but to be unstable against demixing into two uniaxial nematics for kappa=5. The phase diagram for kappa=15 is qualitatively similar to that of the binary mixture, regardless of the amount of polydispersity, while for kappa=5 a sufficient amount of polydispersity stabilizes the biaxial phase. This provides clues for designing an experiment to observe this long searched biaxial phase. |
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