Abstract
Abstract The general framework for the description of orientational ordering of (flexible) molecules in the nematic phase in terms of ordering properties of submolecular units in a modular fashion is presented. Various choices of the elementary submolecular units (segments) leading to different representations of the potential of mean torque are discussed. Transformations among such representations are studied in order to clarify the physical significance of intersegmental correlation terms. It is shown that for n-alkane solutes and chains pendant to nematogenic cores in neat materials, the uncorrelated bond representation (each C‒C bond segment individually interacts with the nematic mean field) used in most of the previous studies of this type gives a poor description of chain ordering. The introduction of orientational correlations among bond segments (particularly nearest neighbor correlations) improves the quality of fits of the order parameter profiles and explains the difficiency of previous models...
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