Universal power law in the orientational relaxation in thermotropic liquid crystals.

We observe a surprisingly general power law decay at short to intermediate times in orientational relaxation in a variety of model systems (both calamitic and discotic, and also lattice) for thermotropic liquid crystals. As all these systems transit across the isotropic-nematic phase boundary, two power law relaxation regimes, separated by a plateau, emerge, giving rise to a steplike feature (well known in glassy liquids) in the single-particle second-rank orientational time correlation function. In contrast to its probable dynamical origin in supercooled liquids, we show that the power law here can originate from the thermodynamic fluctuations of the orientational order parameter, driven by the rapid growth in the second-rank orientational correlation length.

• Publication year

  2005

• Venue

  Physical Review Letters

• Publication date

  2005-08-08

• Fields of study

  Materials Science, Physics, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.197801arXiv cond-mat/0508187PMID 16384024
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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