Qualitatively and Quantitatively Different Configurations of Nematic–Nanoparticle Mixtures

We consider the influence of different nanoparticles or micrometre-scale colloidal objects, which we commonly refer to as particles, on liquid crystalline (LC) orientational order in essentially spatially homogeneous particle-LC mixtures. We first illustrate the effects of coupling a single particle with the surrounding nematic molecular field. A particle could either act as a "dilution", i.e., weakly distorting local effective orientational field, or as a source of strong distortions. In the strong anchoring limit, particles could effectively act as topological point defects, whose topological charge