Self-assembly of Freely-rotating Polydisperse Cuboids: Unveiling the Boundaries of the Biaxial Nematic Phase

摘要: Colloidal cuboids have the potential to self-assemble into biaxial liquid crystal phases, which exhibit two independent optical axes. Over last few decades, several theoretical works predicted existence of a wide region phase diagram where nematic would be stable, but imposed rather strong constraints on particle rotational degrees freedom. In this work, we employ molecular simulation investigate impact size dispersity behaviour freely-rotating hard cuboids, here modelled as self-dual-shaped nanoboards. This peculiar anisotropy, exactly in between oblate and prolate geometry, has been proposed most appropriate promote biaxiality. We observe that radically changes monodisperse systems leads formation elusive phase, being found an large packing fraction vs polydispersity diagram. Although our results confirm tendencies reported past experimental observations colloidal dispersions slightly goethite particles, they cannot reproduce direct isotropic-to-biaxial transition observed these experiments.