期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2010
卷号：107
期号：30
页码：13212-13215
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1004269107
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：The cubic blue phases of liquid crystals are fascinating and technologically promising examples of hierarchically structured soft materials, comprising ordered networks of defect lines (disclinations) within a liquid crystalline matrix. We present large-scale simulations of their domain growth, starting from a blue phase nucleus within a supercooled isotropic or cholesteric background. The nucleated phase is thermodynamically stable; one expects its slow orderly growth, creating a bulk cubic phase. Instead, we find that the strong propensity to form disclinations drives the rapid disorderly growth of a metastable amorphous defect network. During this process, the original nucleus is destroyed; reemergence of the stable phase may therefore require a second nucleation step. Our findings suggest that blue phases exhibit hierarchical behavior in their ordering dynamics, to match the hierarchy in their structure.
