Related papers: Effective free energy method for nematic liquid cr…
One objective of active matter science is to unveil principles by which chaotic microscale dynamics could be transformed into useful work. A nematic liquid crystal environment offers a number of possibilities, one of which is a directional…
We consider a continuum model of active viscoelastic matter, whereby an active nematic liquid-crystal is coupled to a minimal model of polymer dynamics with a viscoelastic relaxation time $\tau_C$. To explore the resulting interplay between…
The wetting behavior of a liquid on solid substrates is governed by the nature of the effective interaction between the liquid-gas and the solid-liquid interfaces, which is described by the binding or wetting potential $g(h)$ which is an…
A phenomenological free energy model is proposed to describe the behavior of smectic liquid crystals, an intermediate phase that exhibits orientational order and layering at the molecular scale. Advantageous properties render the functional…
Using the classical density functional theory of freezing and Monte Carlo computer simulations, we explore the liquid-crystalline phase behavior of hard rectangles on flat and cylindrical manifolds. Moreover, we study the effect of a static…
Polar nematic liquid crystals have two special features, compared with conventional nematic liquid crystals. First, because of flexoelectricity, the combination of polar order and splay reduces the free energy. Second, because of…
Coupling between flow and orientation is a central issue in understanding the collective dynamics of active biofilaments and cells. Active stresses generated by motor activity destroy (quasi-)long-range orientational order and induce…
We calculate the effective forces on hard disks near walls embedded inside active nematic liquid crystals. When the disks are sufficiently close to the wall and the flows are sufficiently slow, we can obtain exact expressions for the…
We consider a system where a spherical particle is suspended in a nematic liquid crystal confined between two walls. We calculate the liquid-crystal mediated potential of mean force between the sphere and a substrate by means of Monte Carlo…
We consider a phenomenological continuum model for an active nematic fluid and show a universal, model independent, instability which renders the homogeneous nematic state unstable to order fluctuations. Using numerical and analytic tools…
In this work, phase diagrams of a modified two-mode phase-field crystal (PFC) that show two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) crystallographic structures were determined by utilizing a free energy minimization method. In this…
Active materials are capable of converting free energy into directional motion, giving rise to striking dynamical phenomena. Developing a general understanding of their structure in relation to the underlying non-equilibrium physics would…
Liquid crystals consisting of biaxial particles can exhibit a much richer phase behavior than their uniaxial counterparts. Usually, one has to rely on simulation results to understand the phase diagram of these systems, since very few…
Various director configurations of a nematic liquid crystal, confined in a toroidal volume and subject to an external magnetic field, were evaluated numerically by performing finite element calculations in three dimensions. The equilibrium…
In this thesis a new model for calculating the total energy of atomic and solid systems is presented. The model is used to study the properties of the Si(100) surface and dislocation dynamics in the diamond structure. For the Si(100)…
We investigate dynamic magneto-optic effects in a ferromagnetic nematic liquid crystal experimentally and theoretically. Experimentally we measure the magnetization and the phase difference of the transmitted light when an external magnetic…
We describe a first-principles statistical mechanics method to calculate the free energies of crystalline alloys that depend on temperature, composition, and strain. The approach relies on an extension of the alloy cluster expansion to…
The isotropic-to-nematic transition in liquid crystals is studied in d=3 spatial dimensions. A simulation method is proposed to measure the angle dependent interfacial tension g(theta), with theta the anchoring angle of the nematic phase at…
Liquid crystal elastomers realize a fascinating new form of soft matter that is a composite of a conventional crosslinked polymer gel (rubber) and a liquid crystal. These {\em solid} liquid crystal amalgams, quite similarly to their…
It has been shown that to calculate the parameters of the electrostatic field of the ion crystal lattice it sufficient to take into account ions located at a distance of 1-2 lattice spacings. More distant ions make insignificant…