Isotropic-nematic interfacial tension of hard and soft rods: application   of advanced grand canonical biased sampling techniques
  Coexistence between the isotropic and the nematic phase in suspensions of rods is studied using grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations with a bias on the nematic order parameter. The biasing scheme makes it possible to estimate the interfacial tension gamma in systems of hard and soft rods. For hard rods with L/D=15, we obtain gamma ~ 1.4 kB T/L^2, with L the rod length, D the rod diameter, T the temperature, and kB the Boltzmann constant. This estimate is in good agreement with theoretical predictions, and the order of magnitude is consistent with experiments. 
R. L. C. Vink, S. Wolfsheimer and T. Schilling