Nematic and smectic liquid crystals modeling with stiff and free-joint Lennard-Jones chain molecules

Abstract: Liquid crystals (LCs) composed of mesogens play important roles in various scientific and engineering problems. How a system with many mesogens can enter a LC state is an interesting and important problem. Using stiff and free-joint Lennard-Jones chain molecules as mesogens, we study the conditions under which the mesogens can enter various LC phases. The guideline is to eliminate the unwanted translational orders under a controlled fine-tuning procedure across a sequence of systems. Instead of monitoring the growth of order out of the disorder, we prepare a configuration of high orientation ordering and find out where it relaxes to. Such a procedure begins with a reference system, consisting of short chains of homogeneous soft spheres, in a liquid-vapor coexistence situation, at which the thermodynamic instability triggers a fast spontaneous growing process. By applying a short pulse of auxiliary field to align the dispersedly oriented clusters, followed by reducing the volume and, finally, changing the homogeneous molecules into heterogeneous chains, we are able to obtain a range of systems, including nematic and smectic LCs, at their stable ordered states. The model can be extended to study the influence of nanoparticles or external field on the LC structure.