Orientation Ordering in Systems of Polymer Chains and in Systems of Mesogens : Approaches to Underscore the Effects of Adducted Particles

Wen-Jong Ma^1*, Shi-Chieh Wang², Chiao-Wen Chang¹, Chin-Kun Hu²

¹Graduate Institute of Applied Physics, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan
²Department of Physics, National Dong-Hwa Univeristy, Hua-Lian, Taiwan

* Presenter:Wen-Jong Ma, email:mwj@nccu.edu.tw

In recent biomedical applications and in liquid crystal material experiments, the control of adducted nano-particles in these systems have raised questions that some of the shared issues may be answered by model studies. Here, we focus on the issues of geometric effects caused by those adducted particles. In simulation of interacting particle mediated aggregation of polymer chains, we underscore how the processes of backbone-alignment of the chains are modified by the adducted particles. The complicated clustering processes can be quantified by monitor separately the tangential and the transverse directions along the curved backbones of the polymers. By putting the formation of liquid crystal state in mesogens effectively on the similar ground as the alignment clustering in polymer chains, we track on how the crystalline (smectic-B) state of aligned short polymer chains loose its in-plane orderingand subsequently, the layered ordering, to obtain, respectively, the smectic-A and the nematic states, by tuning the monomer-monomer interactions under virtually the same thermodynamic conditions. The designing of such models are useful for a systematic analysis of the interfaces between the host mesogen molecules and the adducted particles, where the sizes of the latter are only a few times of those of the former.

Keywords: aggregation, polymer, liquid crystal, adducted particles