Kinetics of orientational order/disorder transitions and their application to carbon material synthesis

This paper treats the kinetics of the orientational order/disorder transitions with special application to liquid crystalline transitions in which molecular mobility is severely limited. Potential applications include non-equilibrium cooling of isotropic liquid phases, lyotropic transitions in which the liquid crystal forming species are dissolved or suspended in viscous solvents and the synthesis of carbon materials from condensed phase organic starting materials. It will be demonstrated that a simple hard line simulation embodying the essential competition between growth rate and mobility in ensembles of canonical anisometric objects can mimic the formation of nanostructures in several important classes of carbon materials.