Joint Institute for High Temperatures

Curvature-induced smectic-C order of tangentially anchored hard spherocylinders on a sphere with a rigidly locked director field

We study the strict locked-orientation limit of hard spherocylinders on a sphere, in which the rod axes are rigidly locked to a prescribed tangential director field. The bulk hard-rod phase diagram contains no smectic-C (Sm-C) phase, so any coherent tilt found here is curvature-i...