Abstract
We report an extensive molecular dynamics study on the translational dynamics of a hybrid system composed of dipolar soft spheres (DSS), representing ferromagnetic particles, suspended in a liquid crystal (LC) matrix. We observe that the LC matrix strongly modifies the dynamics of the DSS. In the isotropic regime, the DSS show a crossover from subdiffusive to normal diffusive behavior at long times, with an increase of the subdiffusive regime as the dipolar coupling strength is increased. In the nematic regime, the LC matrix, due to the collective reorientation of LC particles, imposes a cylindrical confinement on the DSS chains. This leads to a diffusive dynamics of DSS along the nematic director and a subdiffusive dynamics (with an exponent of ∼0.5) in the perpendicular direction. The confinement provided by the LC matrix is also reflected by the oscillatory behavior of the components of the velocity autocorrelation function of the DSS in the nematic phase.
Highlights
Inclusions of nano-to-micro sized particles inside a liquid crystal (LC) matrix have offered a new paradigm for hybrid material design and applications of LCs beyond display materials.[1,2,3] This is one of the most propitious advances in materials science as the self-organizing tendency of LCs provides numerous possibilities of synthesizing fascinating bulk structured materials.[4]
We report an extensive molecular dynamics study on the translational dynamics of a hybrid system composed of dipolar soft spheres (DSS), representing ferromagnetic particles, suspended in a liquid crystal (LC) matrix
Using mean square displacement (MSD) (Section 3.2) and velocity autocorrelation functions (VACF) (Section 3.3), we demonstrate that the DSS show anomalous translational diffusion at low temperatures while the LC matrix shows a normal diffusive behavior at all densities and temperatures
Summary
Inclusions of nano-to-micro sized particles inside a liquid crystal (LC) matrix have offered a new paradigm for hybrid material design and applications of LCs beyond display materials.[1,2,3] This is one of the most propitious advances in materials science as the self-organizing tendency of LCs provides numerous possibilities of synthesizing fascinating bulk structured materials.[4] In this context, suspensions of magnetic particles inside a LC matrix have attracted particular attention in the past few decades These systems, first introduced theoretically in a celebrated work by Brochard and de Gennes,[5] show a rich variety of self-assembled structures and have a wide range of biomedical and technical applications.[6,7,8] The first experimental realization of such suspensions was achieved by doping magnetic particles in a thermotropic LC host.[9] A further early experimental study was performed by Lebert and Martinet who doped lyotropic LCs with a waterbased ferrofluid and observed that the magnetic field required to align LCs is reduced by a factor of thousand.[10].
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