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Updated: Mar 27, 2026

Orientational Transition in a Liquid Crystal Triggered by the Thermodynamic Growth of Interfacial Wetting Sheets
Published on: May 15, 2017
Visualization, coarsening, and flow dynamics of focal conic domains in simulated smectic-A liquid crystals
Danilo B Liarte1,2, Matthew Bierbaum2, Muxin Zhang2
1Institute of Physics, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, SP, Brazil.
Abstract:
Smectic liquid crystals vividly illustrate the subtle interplay of broken translational and orientational symmetries, by exhibiting defect structures forming geometrically perfect confocal ellipses and hyperbolas. Here, we develop and numerically implement an effective theory to study the dynamics of focal conic domains in smectic-A liquid crystals. We use the information about the smectic's structure and energy density provided by our simulations to develop several novel visualization tools for the focal conics. Our simulations accurately describe both simple and extensional shear, which we compare to experiments, and provide additional insight into the coarsening dynamics of focal conic domains.
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