Slave-master mechanism of thermotropic liquid crystal phase transitional behavior

Abstract

We introduce the slave-master mechanism in the phase behavior of two-component systems where both components could exhibit some kind of (quasi) long-range order. The key feature of the mechanism is that one component strongly influences the other while the reverse influence is negligible. To illustrate the effect, we consider systems where each isolated component exhibits an order-disorder phase transition on varying a control parameter (e.g., temperature) to which we refer as the generalized temperature. We present a minimal model that shows robust slave-master behavior. As exemplary systems, we present thermotropic liquid crystals (LCs) exhibiting nematic and smectic A phase order, focusing on the interaction strength between orientational and translational order. Mixtures of nematic LC molecules and anisotropic nanoparticles are also presented. We show that qualitatively different behaviors could emerge via the specific nature of the inter-component interaction. Mastering this mechanism could lead to various applications based on phase tunable properties.