Interaction and response of a smectic-A liquid crystal to a nanometer particle: Phase transition due to the combined effect of the functionalization compound and particle size

The interaction of nanometer particles with organic materials is important because of their increased use in many applications and their potential use in biosystems. We found that liquid crystals respond to nanometer particles differently depending on the surface functionalization of the nanoparticles using x rays and developed a phenomenological model to explain the differences that we observed. We found from the analysis of the peaks close to 0.199 Å−1 that the inverse integrated intensity serves as a measure of how well the liquid crystal has reoriented and compared the graph obtained from the phenomenological theory to the graph obtained with the inverse integrated intensity. An analysis of the widths of these peaks (inverse correlation length) shows that the reorientation under the magnetic field can lead to a phase transition of the portion of the liquid crystal that is reorienting.