Nematic phase: Difference between revisions page on SklogWiki - a wiki for statistical mechanics and thermodynamics

The nematic phase of a liquid crystal has orientational order, but no positional order ^[1].

Dielectric tensor[edit]

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

\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 $\Delta \epsilon$ .

@@ Line 17: / Line 17: @@
 The response of a nematic liquid crystal
 to an external electric field depends on both the sign and the magnitude of <math>\Delta \epsilon</math>.
+==Chiral nematic phase==
+See [[Chiral phases]].
 ==Discotic nematic phase==
 [[Image:discotic_nematic_ellipsoid.png|Discotic-nematic phase for the hard 6x6x1 ellipsoid model. |thumb|right]]