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Instabilities in thin elastic sheets, such as wrinkles, are of broad interest both from a fundamental viewpoint and also because of their potential for engineering applications. Nematic liquid crystal elastomers offer a new form of control…
Topological defects are one of the most conspicuous features of liquid crystals. In two dimensional nematics, they have been shown to behave effectively as particles with both, charge and orientation, which dictate their interactions. Here,…
Instabilities are discussed which take place when a nematic liquid crystal (LC) layer, enclosed between a planar reference plate and a photosensitive substrate, is illuminated with polarized light from the reference side ({\it reverse}…
We consider director configurations of cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) cells with two plane confining substrates. Exact solutions of the Euler-Lagrange equations for out-of-plane orientations of the easy axes that correspond to…
The confinement of liquid crystals inside curved geometries leads to exotic structures, with applications ranging from bio-sensors to optical switches and privacy windows. Here we study how curvature affects the alignment of a cholesteric…
A linear stability analysis of the hydrodynamic equations with respect to the homogeneous cooling state is carried out to identify the conditions for stability of a granular gas of rough hard spheres. The description is based on the results…
We study the kinetics of the nematic-isotropic transition in a two-dimensional liquid crystal by using a lattice Boltzmann scheme that couples the tensor order parameter and the flow consistently. Unlike in previous studies, we find the…
Handedness of the director twist in cholesteric liquid crystals is commonly assumed to be the same throughout the medium, determined solely by the chirality of constituent molecules or chiral additives, albeit distortions of the…
We study experimentally how the double-twist (DT) configuration of cylindrically confined lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals (LCLCs) responds to axial magnetic fields. Our director field model unveils the energetics behind the magnetic…
Chromonic liquid crystals are lyotropic nematic phases whose applications span from food to drug industries. It has recently been suggested that the elastic energy density governing the equilibrium distortions of these materials may be…
Most, but not all, liquid crystals tend to align when subject to shear flow, while most nematic polymeric liquid crystals undergo a tumbling instability, where the director rotate with the flow. The reasons of this instability remain…
Systems of elongated molecules, doped with small amounts of molecules lacking mirror symmetry can form macroscopically twisted cholesteric liquid crystal phases. The aim of this work is to rigorously derive the Oseen-Frank model of…
Based on the London approximation, we investigate numerically the stability of the elementary configurations of entanglement, the twisted-pair and the twisted-triplet, in the vortex-lattice and -liquid phases. We find that, except for the…
The stability of the equilibrium configurations of a nematic liquid crystal confined between two coaxial cylinders is analysed when a radial electric field is applied and the flexoelectric effect is taken into account. The threshold for…
The dynamics of curved vortex filaments is studied analytically and numerically in the framework of a three-dimensional complex Ginzburg-Landau equation (CGLE). It is shown that a straight vortex line is unstable with respect to spontaneous…
An existence of the charge-induced instability is well known for the 4He crystal surface in the rough state. Much less is known about charge-induced instability at the 4He crystal surface in the smooth well-faceted state below the…
In a ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal, the electrostatic interaction can induce a spontaneous cholesteric helix, even if the material is not chiral. If the liquid-crystal cell is infinitely thick, then the predicted pitch depends…
Point defects are ubiquitous in two dimensional crystals and play a fundamental role in determining their mechanical and thermodynamical properties. When crystals are formed on a curved background, finite length grain boundaries (scars) are…
A two-dimensional crystal on the surface of a sphere experiences elastic stress due to the incompatibility of the crystal axes and the curvature. A common mechanism to relax elastic stress is the Asaro-Tiller-Grinfeld (ATG) instability.…
Flagellated microswimmers B. Subtilis dispersed in a nematic phase of a lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal form a living liquid crystal (LLC). The combination of the passive and active components allows us to analyze how the active…