Molecular Crystals and Liquid Crystals, Vol.409, 335-342, 2004
Dielectric properties of a nematic binary mixture
In this paper, a phase diagram is developed,for the molar mixtures of nematic liquid crystals of 5CB and MBBA. In. order to understand the interaction of the two systems, dielectric permittivities epsilon(parallel to) and epsilon(perpendicular to) were measured for mixtures of various concentrations. The usual assumption is that in the absence of chemical reactions the bulk physical properties acid up as a weighted sum of the individual properties. Our dielectric permittivity data clearly show a correlation to the phase diagram and the existence of the induced phase. In order to understand the interactions from a fundamental level, we modeled the 5CB and AMBA molecules using a Silicon Graphics O2 workstation running the software Spartan 5.1. Different electrical surfaces were calculated for a geometrically optimized molecule. Our investigations support the idea of strong charge interactions between the nematic systems.
Keywords:binary nematic mixtures;dielectric permittivity;molar mixtures;molecular modeling;phase diagram