Modifying Nobili-Durand surface energy for conically degenerate anchorings at the interface of liquid crystal colloids.

We propose a surface energy for conically degenerate anchorings of uniaxial liquid crystal mesogens by modifying tensorial Nobili-Durand surface energy that is usually employed for fixed anchoring orientations with preferred polar angles. By minimizing Landau-de Gennes free energy and the proposed surface energy, we obtain the equilibrium director configuration around a spherical colloid in the uniform nematic liquid crystal. Our calculations show that the proposed surface energy can cause boojum or/and Saturn-ring defect textures depending on the equilibrium conic angle. We also study the interactions between two spherical colloids with the equilibrium conic angle 45^{∘}, where the surface energy provides both boojum and Saturn-ring defects on the surface of particles. We compare the calculated anisotropic colloidal interactions with experimental observations [B. Senyuk et al., Nat. Commun. 7, 10659 (2016)2041-172310.1038/ncomms10659]. In agreement with experiment, our results show two stable angular assemblies in the close particle-particle separations. Also, the long-range elastic interactions are almost consistent with the hexadecapolar elastic distortion.