Size effect and stability of polarized fluid phases

Dielectric response from lattices of dipoles with fixed orientation

The properties of dipolar cubic lattices are studied and the paradox of how to obtain a long range polarization in such lattices is resolved by choosing a proper shape of the total system. It has been shown that large but finite number of aligned dipoles prefer to exist as needle shaped macroscopic particles [M. Yoon and D. Tománek, J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 22, 455105 (2010)]. The total energy for a particle in such a system has one short range contribution depending on the packing (the chosen lattice) and one long range term depending on the dipole density of the system. We show that the latter term corresponds exactly to the polarization term from a dielectric medium embedding a sphere of the considered system. There is no need to include a dielectric medium in this modeling and the "dielectric stabilization" is generated solely by the dipoles of the system.

Nematic order by thermal disorder in a three-dimensional lattice spin model with dipolarlike interactions

At low temperatures, some lattice spin models with simple ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic interactions (for example, nearest-neighbor interaction being isotropic in spin space on a bipartite three-dimensional lattice) produce orientationally ordered phases exhibiting nematic (second-rank) order, in addition to the primary first-rank one; on the other hand, in the literature, they have been rather seldom investigated in this respect. Here we study the thermodynamic properties of a three-dimensional model with dipolar-like interaction. Its ground state is found to exhibit full orientational order with respect to a suitably defined staggered magnetization (polarization), but no nematic second-rank order. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations, in conjunction with finite-size scaling analysis, have been used for characterizing its critical behavior; on the other hand, it has been found that nematic order does indeed set in at low temperatures, via a mechanism of order by disorder.