Tricritical behavior of the nematic to smectic-A phase transition in the binary mixture of liquid crystal

Abstract

We propose a phenomenological model to describe the tricritical behavior of the nematic to smectic-A (N-SmA) phase transition in liquid crystal mixture. To describe the mesophase transitions in binary mixture, nematic and smectic order parameters have been coupled with the concentration. We show that a tricritical point on the N-SmA phase transition line can be achieved under certain conditions. The predictive capability of the present model for determining the tricritical point of a binary mixture displaying the N-SmA transition has been demonstrated by testing with reported phase diagrams sharing both phases.

Fluctuations and phase transitions of uniaxial and biaxial liquid crystals using a theoretically informed Monte Carlo and a Landau free energy density

“…These approaches, including Ginzburg-Landau, Euler-Lagrange and theoretically informed Monte Carlo, enable the exploration of length scales required in many engineering applications. Methods that involve atomistic and mesogenic scales have also been used mostly to gain fundamental insights into the underlying physics of LCs [45][46][47][48][49][50][51].…”