Paper detail

Elastic response of a nematic liquid crystal to an immersed nanowire

We study the immersion of a ferromagnetic nanowire within a nematic liquid crystal using a lattice Boltzmann algorithm to solve the full three-dimensional equations of hydrodynamics. We present an algorithm for including a moving boundary, to simulate a nanowire, in a lattice Boltzmann simulation. The nematic imposes a torque on a wire that increases linearly with the angle between the wire and the equilibrium direction of the director field. By rotation of these nanowires, one can determine the elastic constants of the nematic.