Regensburg 2016 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 36: Complex Fluids and Colloids V (joint session DY/BP/CPP)
DY 36.6: Vortrag
Mittwoch, 9. März 2016, 11:30–11:45, H47
The Gyroid phase in a System of Pear-shaped Particles — Philipp Schönhöfer1, Matthieu Marechal1, Klaus Mecke1, Gerd Schröder-Turk2, and •Douglas Cleaver3 — 1Theoretische Physik I, FAU Erlangen, Germany — 2School of Engineering and IT, Murdoch University, Australia — 3Materials and Engineering Research Institute, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
It is established that elongated or flattened mesogens like spherocylinders and oblate discs form liquid crystal phases -- like the nematic or smectic phase -- in addition to the isotropic fluid and crystalline solid states.
A highly complex liquid crystal phase which can be generated by amphiphiles or block co-polymers is the double gyroid Ia3d cubic phase. A promising system which forms this structure consists of hard pear-shaped particles with suitable aspect ratio and degree of tapering.
Using Molecular Dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations with a generalized Gay-Berne potential, the spontaneous formation of the gyroid phase was reproduced. Additionally a defect-free gyroid with the same number of particles per unit cell as the spontaneously formed phase was generated. We calculate the scattering functions and use Voronoi tesselation to study the geometrical properties of both systems.
The next step is to introduce hard spheres which will take up the role of solvent to model mixtures such as the lipid-water system. With an explicit solvent the system should be complex enough to model most common phenomena in cubic phases yet simple enough to allow us to simulate large systems.