On the field-induced switching of molecular organization in a biaxial nematic cell and its relaxation

We investigate the switching of a biaxial nematic filling a flat cell with planar homogeneous anchoring using a coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulation. We have found that an aligning field applied across the film, and acting on specific molecular axes, can drive the reorientation of the secondary biaxial director up to one order of magnitude faster than that for the principal director. While the pi/2 switching of the secondary director does not affect the alignment of the long molecular axes, the field-driven reorientation of the principal director proceeds via a concerted rotation of the long and transversal molecular axes. More importantly, while upon switching off a (relatively) weak or intermediate field, the biaxial nematic liquid crystal is always able to relax to the initial surface aligned director state; this is not the case when using fields above a certain threshold. In that case, while the secondary director always recovers the initial state, the principal one remains, occasionally, trapped in a nonuniform director state due to the formation of domain walls. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.