Smectic-A, crystalline and columnar ordering in the system of hard parallel cylinders

We study a system of hard parallel cylinders in the framework of the smoothed-density approximation (SDA). Using a bifurcation analysis, we argue that, apart from the nematic phase, smectic-A, solid (or crystalline smectic-B) and columnar phases should also occur in this system. We predict the following sequence of phase transitions: nematic-smectic-A at η* = η/ηcp = 0·31, smectic-A-solid (or smectic-B) at η* ≈ 0·59 and solid (or smectic-B)-columnar at η* ≈ 0·84, where ηcp = 0·9069 is the close-packing density. In our approach we cannot distinguish between a solid phase and a crystalline smectic-B phase.