Orientational orders in binary mixtures of hard HGO molecules

TL;DR

This study investigates how binary mixtures of hard Gaussian overlap molecules exhibit orientational order, revealing that small molecules can form liquid crystal phases when confined by larger molecules, depending on composition and elongation.

Contribution

It demonstrates that small HGO molecules can develop liquid crystal phases in mixtures with larger HGO molecules, highlighting the role of confinement and molecular elongation.

Findings

Small HGO molecules can form liquid crystal phases in mixtures.

Large HGO molecules induce alignment of small molecules.

Liquid crystal behavior depends on mixture composition and elongation.

Abstract

studied liquid crystal phases of binary mixtures of non-spherical molecules. The components of the mixtures are two kinds of hard Gaussian overlap (HGO) molecules, one kind of molecules with a small molecular-elongation parameter (small HGO molecules) cannot form stable liquid crystal phase in bulk, and other with a large elongation parameter (large HGO molecules) can form liquid crystal phase easily. In the mixtures, like the large HGO molecules, the small HGO molecules can also form an orientation-ordered phase, which is because that the large HGO molecules can form complex confining surfaces to induce the alignment of the small molecules and generate an isotropic-anisotropic phase transition in the whole binary mixtures. We also study the transition on different mixtures composed of small and large HGO molecules with different elongations and different concentrations of the large molecules. The obtained result implies that small anisotropic molecules might show liquid crystal behavior in confinement.