Spatially Varying Liquid Crystal Order: Theory and Simulations

Gavin-Rae Barnaby with Rolfe Petschek

Hard Tetrahedra and shapes close to hard tetrahedra pack well when they are oriented in ways different from their neighbors.  The Petschek group has hypothesized that long-range periodic orientation or liquid crystal order explains the complicated crystalline structures that form in computer simulations of such particles.  This project will continue this work.  An existing program for analyzing such order will be sped up and used to analyze old data.  An existing simulation program will be run with slightly different parameters in order to obtain better data, and to test if other crystalline structures are better than ones that are currently known, either for hard tetrahedra or for similar shapes.