ARE SURFACES PERTINENT FOR DESCRIBING SOME THERMOTROPIC LIQUID CRYSTAL PHASES?

Abstract

Surfaces, like minimal surfaces, are commonly used to describe intricate thermotropic liquid crystalline phase structures: cubic phases, TGB phases, quadratic phases, blue phases, and smectic blue phases. Such geometrical models are good tools to visualize the competition between the various molecular interactions generating these phases although they often cannot lead to the prediction of the thermodynamic phase diagrams.