Sequential quenching of randomly deposited ellipsoids: Anisotropy and spatial patterns

Abstract

We studied the sequential quenching of prolate ellipsoids on a homogeneous surface by using our proposed pair potential whose repulsive part was that of hard ellipses and attractive part was the r −6 pairwise attraction. Both the strength and range parameters for the attraction were functions of the orientations of the pair of ellipses and related by ε ∝ σ − λ . The parameter λ determines the relative strength of the side-by-side and end-to-end attractions and thus plays an important role in determining the alignment of the particles. We adopted the value λ = 2.19 by using point-energy additivity to compute the minimum energies for both of these configurations for a pair of ellipsoids of revolution with aspect ratio of 2:1. We investigated the effect of temperature and the parameter λ on the alignments of ellipses. Both radial distribution function, g ( r ) , and orientational correlation function, G ( r ) , show the expected longer ranges of orientational correlation at lower temperatures and show higher degree of orientational order for λ = 3.5 than λ = 2.19 and 0.10. This can also be seen in the examples of configurations showing that for λ = 3.5 , ellipses are more aligned than λ = 2.19 and 0.1.