Seminar of the Institute for Condensed Matter Physics

Nematic colloids consist of colloidal particles suspended in nematic liquid crystal. These are of much current interest because the colloidal particles show a variety of structures: chains, crystals, foam-like composites. All the structures can be altered by varying physical factors, such as the strength and direction of external fields. Nematic colloids are intriguing from both practical and fundamental perspectives. All molecular interactions in the system are short-ranged, but the resulting effects are long-ranged. My talk is about how such behavior of nematic colloids appears in molecular theory of correlations. Our theory is statistic mechanical in nature. It starts on the level of particle interactions modeled in a physically relevant way and employs the integral equation approach for pair correlation functions and single-particle distributions.