Mixtures composed of liquid crystals and carbon nanotubes.
The phenomenological model to describe the liquid crystal-carbon nanotubes mixture presented in a previous paper [P. van der Schoot, V. Popa-Nita, and S. Kralj, J. Phys. Chem. B 112, 4512 (2008)] has been extended to include the isotropic carbon nanotubes-nematic thermotropic liquid crystal interaction. It is assumed that the carbon nanotubes in the isotropic phase act as an external random field on liquid crystal component. The influence of the randomly orientational disorder on the phase diagram of the mixture and orientational order parameters profiles of both components is theoretically analyzed for different values of temperature, volume fraction of carbon nanotubes, nematic carbon nanotubes-nematic liquid crystal coupling strength and the random field strength.
Faculty of Physics, University of Bucharest, P. O. Box MG-11, Bucharest 077125, Romania.
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