A generalized molecular theory for nematic liquid crystals formed by non-cylindrically symmetric molecules

Abstract

Many molecular theories of nematic liquid crystals consider the constituent molecules as cylindrically symmetric. In many cases, this approximation may be useful. However the molecules of real nematics have lower symmetry. Therefore a theory was developed (Mol. Phys. 30 (1975) 1345) for an ensemble of such particles based upon a general expansion of the pairwise intermolecular potential together with the molecular field approximation. In this study, we would like to handle this molecular field theory by using Tsallis thermostatistics which has been commonly used for a decade to study the physical systems. With this aim, we would like to investigate the dependence of the order parameters on temperature and would like to report the variation of the critical values of the order parameters at the transition temperature with the entropic index.