Dynamics of cholesteric liquid crystal with variable pitch

TL;DR

This paper develops a lattice model to analyze the free energy and dynamics of cholesteric liquid crystals with variable pitch, incorporating elastic constants and spatial shifts of director components for improved accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a novel lattice model accounting for spatial shifts of director components to enhance energy and dynamic calculations in cholesteric liquid crystals.

Findings

The model accurately estimates free energy variations.

It improves calculations of localized states in liquid crystals.

The approach reduces errors in low-density lattice simulations.

Abstract

We have written expressions for the free energy of a cholesteric liquid crystal in an approximation using the elasticity constants K_1, K_2, K_3 and the energy variation and the corresponding energy and energy gradient along the direction of the director vector n at each lattice point for the lattice model. A feature of this lattice model is the shift of the n components in space relative to each other. An assessment has been made of the error associated with the respective substitution. Such an approach can increase the accuracy of calculations of the energy and dynamics of localized states in liquid crystals on low-density lattices.