On the isotropic-biaxial phase transition in nematic liquid crystals

Giuseppe Gaeta

Published 2015-11-29Version 1

We apply a recently developed technique to determine adapted coordinates for the sixth degree Landau-deGennes potential, in which the potential is specially simple, to analyze the possibility of a direct transition between the fully symmetric state and a biaxial phase in nematic liquid crystals. {Our results confirm, with simpler computations, results by Allender and Longa.