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Published on: August 15, 2018
Mutual diffusion of inclusions in freely suspended smectic liquid crystal films
Zhiyuan Qi1, Zoom Hoang Nguyen1, Cheol Soo Park1
1Department of Physics and the Liquid Crystal Materials Research Center, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA.
Abstract:
We study experimentally and theoretically the hydrodynamic interaction of pairs of circular inclusions in two-dimensional, fluid smectic membranes suspended in air. By analyzing their Brownian motion, we find that the radial mutual mobilities of identical inclusions are independent of their size but that the angular coupling becomes strongly size dependent when their radius exceeds a characteristic hydrodynamic length. These observations are described well for arbitrary inclusion separations by a model that generalizes the Levine-MacKintosh theory of point-force response functions and uses a boundary-element approach to calculate the mobility matrix for inclusions of finite extent.
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