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Updated: Jun 12, 2026

Orientational Transition in a Liquid Crystal Triggered by the Thermodynamic Growth of Interfacial Wetting Sheets
Published on: May 15, 2017
String-fluid transition in systems with aligned anisotropic interactions
P C Brandt1, A V Ivlev, G E Morfill
1Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik, Garching 85741, Germany. brandt@mpe.mpg.de
Abstract:
Systems with aligned anisotropic interactions between particles exhibit numerous phase transitions. A remarkable example of the fluid phase transition occurring in such systems is the formation of particle strings--the so-called "string" or "chain" fluids. We employ an approach based on the Ornstein-Zernike (OZ) equation, which allows us to calculate structural properties of fluids with aligned anisotropic interactions. We show that the string-fluid transition can be associated with the bifurcation of the "isotropic" correlation length into two distinct scales which characterize the longitudinal and transverse order in string fluids and, hence, may be used as a fingerprint of this transition. The comparison of the proposed OZ theory with the Monte Carlo simulations reveals fairly good agreement.
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