Relation between static short-range order and dynamic heterogeneities in a nanoconfined liquid crystal

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2008 Oct;78(4 Pt 1):040701. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.78.040701. Epub 2008 Oct 6.

Abstract

We analyze the molecular dynamics heterogeneity of the liquid crystal 4-n-octyl-4'-cyanobiphenyl nanoconfined in porous silicon. We show that the temperature dependence of the dynamic correlation length xi_(wall) , which measures the distance over which a memory of the interfacial slowing down of the molecular dynamics persists, is closely related to the growth of the short-range static order arising from quenched random fields. More generally, this result may also shed some light on the connection between static and dynamic heterogeneities in a wide class of condensed and soft matter systems.