Isotropic-nematic interfacial tension of hard and soft rods: application of advanced grand canonical biased-sampling techniques.
Coexistence between the isotropic and the nematic phase in suspensions of rods is studied using grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations with a bias on the nematic order parameter. The biasing scheme makes it possible to estimate the interfacial tension gamma(IN) in systems of hard and soft rods. For hard rods with LD=15, we obtain gammaIN approximately 1.4kBT/L2, with L the rod length, D the rod diameter, T the temperature, and kB the Boltzmann constant. This estimate is in good agreement with theoretical predictions, and the order of magnitude is consistent with experiments.
Vink
R L C
RL
Institut für Physik, Johannes Gutenberg Universität, D-55099 Mainz, Staudinger Weg 7, Germany. vink@uni-mainz.de
Wolfsheimer
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Schilling
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