Sequential quenching of randomly deposited ellipsoids: anisotropy and spatial patterns

We studied the sequential quenching of prolate ellipsoids on a homogeneous surface by using our proposed pair potential whose repulsive part was that of hard ellipses and attractive part was the r-6 pairwise attraction. Both the strength and range parameters for the attraction were functions of the orientations of the pair of ellipses and related by epsilon proportional, variantsigma-lambda. The parameter lambda determines the relative strength of the side-by-side and end-to-end attractions and thus plays an important role in determining the alignment of the particles. We adopted the value lambda=2.19 by using point-energy additivity to compute the minimum energies for both of these configurations for a pair of ellipsoids of revolution with aspect ratio of 2:1. We investigated the effect of temperature and the parameter lambda on the alignments of ellipses. Both radial distribution function, g(r), and orientational correlation function, G(r), show the expected longer ranges of orientational correlation at lower temperatures and show higher degree of orientational order for lambda=3.5 than lambda=2.19 and 0.10. This can also be seen in the examples of configurations showing that for lambda=3.5, ellipses are more aligned than lambda=2.19 and 0.1.