The nature of the ordered phase of the confined self-assembled rigid rod model

TL;DR

This paper studies the ordered phase of a 3D self-assembled rigid rod model confined on a lattice, revealing a transition to uniaxial order at finite temperatures and suggesting similar behavior in unconfined systems.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the confined model's ordered phase becomes uniaxial at finite temperatures, contrasting with its ground state, and suggests uniaxial order may also occur in unconfined models.

Findings

Ordered phase becomes uniaxial at finite temperatures.

Layer correlations increase with system size.

Unconfined model may also exhibit uniaxial order.

Abstract

We investigate the nature of the ordered phase and the orientational correlations between adjacent layers of the confined three-dimensional self-assembled rigid rod model, on the cubic lattice. We find that the ordered phase at finite temperatures becomes uniaxial in the thermodynamic limit, by contrast to the ground state (partial) order where the orientation of the uncorrelated layers is perpendicular to one of the three lattice directions. The increase of the orientational correlation between layers as the number of layers increases suggests that the unconfined model may also exhibit uniaxial ordering at finite temperatures.