Curvature-directed anchoring and defect structure of colloidal smectic liquid crystals in confinement.

ABSTRACT: Rod-like objects at high packing fractions can exhibit liquid crystalline ordering. By controlling how the rods align near a boundary, i.e. the anchoring, the defects of a liquid crystal can be selected and tuned. For smectic phases, the rods break rotational and translational symmetry by forming lamellae. Smectic defects thereby include both discontinuities in the rod orientational order (disclinations), as well as in the positional order (dislocations). In this work, we use experiments and simulations to uncover the geometrical conditions necessary for a boundary to set the anchoring of a confined, particle-resolved, smectic liquid crystal. We confine a colloidal smectic within elliptical wells of varying size and shape for a smooth variation of the boundary curvature. We find that the a

SUBMITTER: Jull EIL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11586669 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature