Related papers: Commentary on: "Unconventional elasticity in smect…
We study the relaxation modes of an interface between a lyotropic lamellar phase and a gas or a simple liquid. The response is found to be qualitatively different from those of both simple liquids and single-component smectic-A liquid…
We study elasticity of spontaneously orientationally-ordered amorphous solids, characterized by a vanishing transverse shear modulus, as realized for example by nematic elastomers and gels. We show that local heterogeneities and elastic…
Smectic liquid crystals are materials formed by stacking deformable, fluid layers. Though smectics prefer to have flat, uniformly-spaced layers, boundary conditions can impose curvature on the layers. Since the layer spacing and curvature…
We report the smectic $A_F$, a new liquid crystal phase of the ferroelectric nematic realm. The smectic $A_F$ is a phase of small polar, rod-shaped molecules which form two-dimensional fluid layers spaced by approximately the mean molecular…
We develop an explicit and tractable representation of a twist-grain-boundary phase of a smectic A liquid crystal. This allows us to calculate the interaction energy between grain boundaries and the relative contributions from the bending…
The sol-gel transition is studied in two purely entropic models consisting of hard spheres in continuous three-dimensional space, with a fraction $p$ of nearest neighbor spheres tethered by inextensible bonds. When all the tethers are…
The short-range order which remains when the isotropic to smectic-A transition is perturbed by a gel of silica nanoparticles (aerosils) has been studied using high-resolution synchrotron x-ray diffraction. The gels have been created…
In our previous study, we demonstrated the existence of an unidentified ferroelectric smectic phase in the low-temperature region of the ferroelectric smectic A phase, where the layer spacing decreases with decreasing temperature. In the…
We determine the hydrodynamic modes of the superfluid analog of a smectic-A phase in liquid crystals, i.e., a state in which both gauge invariance and translational invariance along a single direction are spontaneously broken. Such a…
We examine in detail the semi-leptonic decay $\Lambda_b \to \Lambda_c \tau{\bar \nu}_{\tau}$, which may confirm previous hints, from the analogous $B$ decay, of a new physics beyond the standard model. First of all, starting from rather…
The phase behavior of the system of parallel rigid triblock copolymers is examined using the second-virial density functional theory. The triblock particle consists of two identical infinitely thin hard rods of finite lengths on the…
Different liquid crystalline phases with long-range orientational but not positional order, so-called nematic phases, are scarce. It rarely occurs that a new nematic phase is discovered and such event is inevitably accompanied by a great…
Stability is an important and fruitful avenue of research for liquid crystal elastomers. At constant temperature, upon stretching, the homogeneous state of a nematic body becomes unstable, and alternating shear stripes develop at very low…
We present a unified formulation of a rotationally invariant nonlinear elasticity for a variety of spontaneously anisotropic phases, and use it to study thermal fluctuations in nematic elastomers and spontaneously anisotropic gels. We find…
We demonstrate that two-dimensional crystals made of active particles can experience extremely large spontaneous deformations without melting. Using particles mostly interacting via pairwise repulsive forces, we show that such active…
The normal modes of a continuum solid endowed with a random distribution of line defects that behave like elastic strings are described. These strings interact with elastic waves in the bulk, generating wave dispersion and attenuation. As…
Extra-large deformations in ultra-soft elastic materials are ubiquitous, yet systematic studies and methods to understand the mechanics of such huge strains are lacking. Here we investigate this complex problem systematically with a simple…
We demonstrate that the phase transition from columnar-hexagonal liquid crystal to hexagonal-crystalline solid falls into an unusual universality class, which in three-dimensional allows for both discontinuous transitions as well as…
Anti-plane shear deformations of a hexagonal quasi-crystal with multiple screw dislocations are considered. Using a variational formulation, the elastic equilibrium is characterized via limit of minimizers of a core-regularized energy…
In this paper is discussed a class of static spherically symmetric solutions of the general relativistic elasticity equations. The main point of discussion is the comparison of two matter models given in terms of their stored energy…