Elastic Behavior of Liquid Crystal Mixtures

Liquid crystalline (LC) media exhibit mesoscale ordering which may be exploited in a variety of functional materials. Promising new applications in nano-templating and bio-sensing leverage the relative strengths of ordering elasticity and topological defects for specific placement and dramatic response. Precise engineering of nematic states for these applications will involve the use of mixtures having broad nematic ranges and desirable elasticity, which necessitates detailed understanding of the molecular interplay of mesogenic species. Here, we present an initial investigation of model binary LC mixtures in bulk, under confinement and in the presence of externally applied stress, utilizing density-of-states methods to precisely map out bulk phase diagrams and study their elastic response.