  We study a quantum-dots (QDs) dispersed bent core liquid crystalline system
in planar geometry and present experimental measurements of the order
parameter, dielectric dispersion and absorption spectra, optical textures, with
attention to variations with temperature. A bent core liquid crystal (LC)
14-2M-CH$_3$ is used as the host material and CdSe/ZnS core-shell type QDs are
used as the dopant. The nematic (N) phase exhibited by the pristine (undoped)
LC 14-2M-CH$_3$ contains cybotactic clusters, which are retained by its QDs
incorporated LC nanocomposite. Our notable findings concern the reduction of
the orientational order parameter of the QDs dispersed LC system compared to
its pristine counterpart, at fixed temperatures, and a reduction of the size of
the cybotactic clusters due to the incorporation of QDs. The reduced order
parameter for the doped system is accompanied by reduced birefringence,
increased activation energy and a qualitative reduction in the dielectric
anisotropy. We complement the experiments with a novel Landau-de Gennes type
free energy for a doped bent core LC system, that qualitatively captures the
doping-induced reduced order parameter and its variation with temperature. The
dependency of the mean order parameter on several other factors (e.g. cluster
size, coupling parameter) are also analyzed.
