Nematic phase

Nematic phase for the hard 6x1x1 ellipsoid model.

The nematic phase has orientational order, but no positional order.

Discotic nematic phase

Discotic-nematic phase for the hard 6x6x1 ellipsoid model.

Dielectric tensor

In the uniaxial nematic phase, defining the z-axis to be parallel to the nematic axis, one has

Failed to parse (SVG (MathML can be enabled via browser plugin): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \epsilon_{\alpha \beta}= \begin{pmatrix} \epsilon_\bot & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & \epsilon_\bot & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & \epsilon_\| \end{pmatrix}}

The anisotropy is defined as

$\Delta \epsilon =\epsilon _{\|}-\epsilon _{\bot }$.

The response of a nematic liquid crystal to an external electric field depends on both the sign and the magnitude of Failed to parse (SVG (MathML can be enabled via browser plugin): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \Delta \epsilon} .

Biaxial nematic phase

1. Carl McBride and Enrique Lomba "Hard biaxial ellipsoids revisited: Numerical results", Fluid Phase Equilibria 255 pp. 37-45 (2007)
2. Roberto Berardi, Luca Muccioli, and Claudio Zannoni "Field response and switching times in biaxial nematics", Journal of Chemical Physics 128 024905 (2008)