Related papers: Flexoelectric blue phases
The sliding columnar phase is a new liquid-crystalline phase of matter composed of two-dimensional smectic lattices stacked one on top of the other. This phase is characterized by strong orientational but weak positional correlations…
By means of an accurate path-integral Monte Carlo we investigate a two-dimensional ensemble of particles interacting via a Lifshitz-Petrich-Gaussian potential. In particular, analysing structures described by a commensurate ratio between…
We predict the existence of a new defect-lattice phase near the nematic - smectic-C (NC) transition. This tilt- analogue of the blue phase is a lattice of double-tilt cylinders. We discuss the structure and stability of the cone phase. We…
Low-dimensional (LD) transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) in the form of nanoflakes, which consist of one or several layers, are the subject of intensive fundamental and applied research. Due to the size-induced transition from a bulk to…
Chromonic liquid crystals (CLCs) are lyotropic materials which are attracting growing interest for their adaptability to living systems. A considerable body of works has been devoted to exploring their properties and applications. In this…
We study the consequences of Coulomb interactions on a system undergoing a putative first order phase transition. In two dimensions (2D), near the critical density, the system is universally unstable to the formation of new intermediate…
We demonstrate that plastic deformation in solids is associated with a dynamic transition that is reminiscent to the transition from a superconducting to a mixed phase in Type II superconductors. We report analytic calculations, extensive…
We present detailed systematic studies of structural transformations in thin liquid crystal films with the smectic-C to hexatic phase transition. For the first time all possible structures reported in the literature are observed for one…
The phonon spectrum of cubic cadmium metastannate and the crystal structures of its distorted phases were calculated from first principles within the density functional theory. It is shown that the phonon spectrum and the energy spectrum of…
Liquid-crystal networks consist of weakly crosslinked polymers that are coupled to liquid-crystal molecules. The resultant hybrid system has rich elastic properties. We develop a phase field model to describe mechanical properties of a…
The rotational instability of the electric polarization P during phase transformations between ferroelectric phases is of great practical interest, since it may be accompanied by extremely large values of the piezoelectric coefficient, and…
We study the phase ordering colloids suspended in a thermotropic nematic liquid crystal below the clearing point Tni and the resulting aggregated structure. Small (150nm) PMMA particles are dispersed in a classical liquid crystal matrix,…
Two dimensional crystals melt via an intermediate \textit{hexatic} phase which is characterized by an anomalous scaling of spatial and orientational correlation functions and the absence of an attraction between dislocations. We propose a…
Phase-ordering dynamics in nematic liquid crystals has been the subject of much active investigation in recent years in theory, experiments and simulations. With a rapid quench from the isotropic to nematic phase a large number of…
We study both theoretically and experimentally switching dynamics in surface stabilized ferroelectric liquid crystal cells with asymmetric boundary conditions. In these cells the bounding surfaces are treated differently to produce…
We construct a family of short-range resonating-valence-bond wave functions on a layered cubic lattice, allowing for a tunable anisotropy in the amplitudes assigned to nearest-neighbour valence bonds along one axis. Monte Carlo simulations…
It is demonstrated that the substances with small difference in the free energies of the ferroelectric and antiferroelectric phases possess a set of properties characteristic for the so-called "dipole glasses". Possible phase diagrams of…
A phase field model of a crystalline material at the mesoscale is introduced to develop the necessary theoretical framework to study plastic flow due to dislocation motion. We first obtain the elastic stress from the phase field free energy…
The macroscopic surface electric susceptibility determines the linear optical properties of an insulating single-layer two-dimensional atomic crystal, and can be expressed in terms of the microscopic polarizability of the atoms. We compute…
We propose the Landau model for lock-in phase transitions in uniaxially modulated improper ferroelectric incommensurate-commensurate systems of class I. It includes Umklapp terms of third and fourth order and secondary order parameter…