Related papers: Effective free energy method for nematic liquid cr…
The twist-bend nematic phase, $N_{\rm TB}$, may be viewed as a heliconical molecular arrangement in which the director $\bf n$ precesses uniformly about an extra director field, $\bf t$. It corresponds to a nematic ground state exhibiting…
The extended Frank elastic energy density is used to investigate the existence of a stable periodically modulate structure that appears as a ground state exhibiting a twist-bend molecular arrangement. For an unbounded sample, we show that…
The entropy of a polymer confined in a curved surface and the elastic free energy of a membrane consisting of polymers are obtained by scaling analysis. It is found that the elastic free energy of the membrane has the form of the in-plane…
Nematicity is a well known property of liquid crystals and has been recently discussed in the context of strongly interacting electrons. An electronic nematic phase has been seen by many experiments in certain strongly correlated materials,…
The multidimensional energy surface of a cholesteric liquid crystal in a planar cell is investigated as a function of spherical coordinates determining the director orientation. Minima on the energy surface correspond to the stable states…
A phase eld approach is developed to model wetting and heterogeneous crystal nucleation of an undercooled pure liquid in contact with a sharp wall. We discuss various choices for the boundary condition at the wall and determine the…
Understanding and computing the entropic forces exerted by polymer chains under confinement is important for many reasons, from research to applications. However, extracting properties related to the free energy, such as the force (or…
Active matter embraces systems that self-organize at different length and time scales, often exhibiting turbulent flows. Here, we use a quasi-two-dimensional nematically ordered layer of a protein-based active gel to experimentally…
We report filling-fraction dependent dielectric spectroscopy measurements on the relaxation dynamics of the rod-like nematogen 7CB condensed in 13 nm silica nanochannels. In the film-condensed regime, a slow interface relaxation dominates…
This review introduces the elasticity theory of two-dimensional crystals and nematic liquid crystals on curved surfaces, the energetics of topological defects (disclinations, dislocations and pleats) in these ordered phases, and the…
An energy-based liquid-vapor interface detection method is presented using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of liquid menisci confined between two parallel plates under equilibrium and evaporation/condensation conditions. This method…
In the electromechanical theory of nerve stimulation, the nerve impulse consists of a traveling region of solid membrane in a liquid environment. Therefore, the free energy necessary to stimulate a pulse is directly related to the free…
We derive a F\"{o}ppl-von K\'{a}rm\'{a}n-type constitutive model for solid liquid crystalline plates where the nematic director may or may not rotate freely relative to the elastic network. To obtain the reduced two-dimensional model, we…
We study a simple model of a nematic liquid crystal made of parallel ellipsoidal particles interacting via a repulsive Gaussian law. After identifying the relevant solid phases of the system through a careful zero-temperature scrutiny of as…
We use a hybrid method of lattice Boltzmann and finite differences to simulate flat and curved interfaces between the nematic and isotropic phases of a liquid crystal described by the Landau-de Gennes theory. For the flat interface, we…
Two-dimensional active nematics are often modeled using phenomenological continuum theories that describe the dynamics of the nematic director and fluid velocity through partial differential equations (PDEs). While these models provide a…
We report the status of a high-statistics Monte Carlo simulation of non-self-avoiding crystalline surfaces with extrinsic curvature on lattices of size up to $128^2$ nodes. We impose free boundary conditions. The free energy is a gaussian…
A nematic liquid crystal confined to the surface of a sphere exhibits topological defects of total charge $+2$ due to the topological constraint. In equilibrium, the nematic field forms four $+1/2$ defects, located at the corners of a…
A compressed knotted ring polymer in a confining cavity is modelled by a knotted lattice polygon confined in a cube in ${\mathbb Z}^3$. The GAS algorithm [17] is used to sample lattice polygons of fixed knot type in a confining cube and to…
We introduce a diffuse-interface Landau-de Gennes free energy for nematic liquid crystals (NLC) systems, with free boundaries, in three dimensions submerged in isotropic liquid, and a phase field is introduced to model the deformable…