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High-Contrast and Fast Photorheological Switching of a Twist-Bend Nematic Liquid Crystal
Published on: October 31, 2019
Electro-osmosis in nematic liquid crystals
O M Tovkach1,2, M Carme Calderer3, Dmitry Golovaty1
1Department of Mathematics, The University of Akron, Akron, Ohio 44325, USA.
Abstract:
We derive a mathematical model of a nematic electrolyte based on a variational formulation of nematodynamics. We verify the model by comparing its predictions to the results of the experiments on the substrate-controlled liquid-crystal-enabled electrokinetics. In the experiments, a nematic liquid crystal confined to a thin planar cell with surface-patterned anchoring conditions exhibits electro-osmotic flows along the "guiding rails" imposed by the spatially varying director. Extending our previous work, we consider a general setup which incorporates dielectric anisotropy of the liquid-crystalline matrix and the full set of nematic viscosities.
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