Physical Review E 2012-11-01

Doping the nematic liquid crystal 5CB with milled BaTiO3 nanoparticles.

Alexander Lorenz, Natalie Zimmermann, Satyendra Kumar, Dean R Evans, Gary Cook, Heinz-S Kitzerow

Index: Phys. Rev. E. Stat. Nonlin. Soft Matter Phys. 86(5 Pt 1) , 051704, (2012)

Full Text: HTML

Abstract

The simple nematic mesogen 5CB was doped with milled BaTiO3 nanoparticles and was investigated with x-ray scattering. Doping with BaTiO3 nanoparticles of 9 nm in diameter led to the formation of crystallites. These crystallites precipitated and formed a waxlike nanodispersion of 5CB and nanoparticles, which led to intense x-ray scattering signals characteristic of a multilayer structure. Surprisingly, the multilayers possess unusual interlayer spacing, which cannot be explained by simple smectic order of the calamitic molecules.