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Updated: Aug 9, 2026

Combining Microfluidics and Microrheology to Determine Rheological Properties of Soft Matter during Repeated Phase Transitions
Published on: April 19, 2018
Phase transitions of semiflexible hard-sphere chain liquids
Hanif Bayat Movahed1, Raul Cruz Hidalgo, D E Sullivan
1Department of Physics, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON N1G2W1, Canada.
Abstract:
We present a density-functional theory for describing liquid-crystalline phase transitions in a fluid of semiflexible hard-sphere chain molecules based on the Onsager second-virial approximation for the free energy. Key ingredients of this theory are the generation of semiflexible chain conformations and calculation of the pair excluded volume and excluded area using a single-chain Monte Carlo enumeration method. First, we investigate the isotropic-nematic phase transition. Next, the theory is extended to account for a smectic-A phase by a bifurcation analysis around the nematic solution. The perturbation is calculated using a lowest-order Fourier series representation.
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