Anomalous Diffusion Effects on the Electrical Impedance Response of Liquid-Crystalline Systems

The electrical impedance response of six nematic liquid crystals samples is analyzed by means of an extension of the Poisson-Nernst-Planck diffusional model. This formulation includes fractional derivatives of distributed order governing the behavior of the bulk density of mobile charges, whose solutions are subjected to integro-differential equations accounting for the boundary conditions. The role of the intrinsic surface lengths involved in the adsorption-desorption phenomena at the electrodes is emphasized, in order to analyze the frequency dependence of the real and imaginary parts of the electrical impedance experimentally obtained.