Abstract
The alignment of nonspherical particles is inferred from the solution of a Fokker-Planck equation where a thermal torque has been taken into account which is proportional to the second spatial derivative of the temperature field. A pretransitional enhancement of the effect is predicted for the isotropic phase of a liquid crystal. Two distinct physical mechanisms are considered in order to estimate the magnitude of the thermal torque. One of them is due to the pressure variation at constant density. For constant pressure, the torque is inferred from the collision term of an Enskog-Boltzmann equation generalized to (strongly) nonspherical particles. In both cases, the resulting heat flow birefringence is of measurable size.
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