Liquid Crystals on Disordered Surfaces

• Applicant: Dr. Richard L.C. Vink
• Subject Area: Statistical Physics, Nonlinear Dynamics, Complex Systems, Soft and Fluid Matter, Biological Physics ; Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics
• Term: from 2007 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 50643260

It is widely recognized that liquid crystals at surfaces are important for industrial applications. At the same time, the ordering properties of liquid crystals at surfaces also raise fundamental questions. At present, these properties are surprisingly poorly understood. Even the seemingly trivial case of liquid crystals on perfectly flat surfaces remains, to this day, controversial. It is my ambition to improve our understanding, and to ultimately answer the question how liquid crystals arrange themselves on non-ideal surfaces. Non-ideal surfaces contain quenched disorder or impurities. The case of quenched disorder is interesting because liquid crystals contain both translational and orientational degrees of freedom. One can thus envision situations where the disorder couples to the translational degrees of freedom, the orientational degrees of freedom, or both. Already for simple fluids, which only have translational degrees of freedom, the influence of quenched disorder is enormous. This was demonstrated in computer simulations performed by me, which were recently published in Physical Review Letters. In this proposal, I plan to apply my simulation expertise further, and to use it to investigate liquid crystals at surfaces. The ultimate goal is to understand how surface disorder affects the phase behavior of liquid crystals. An interesting interplay between surface disorder, and the translational/orientational properties of the liquid crystals, is expected to occur.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups