Related papers: Nematic cells with defect-patterned alignment laye…
We present a theoretical study of the director fields and energetics of nematic liquid crystal shells with two pairs of surface defects. The pairs of defects can undergo abrupt transitions between a configuration of maximum separation to at…
We study two-dimensional equilibrium configurations of nematic liquid crystal (NLC) director in a cell confined between two parallel surfaces: a planar surface and a spatially modulated one. The relief of the modulated surface is described…
A lattice Boltzmann scheme is presented which recovers the dynamics of nematic and chiral liquid crystals; the method essentially gives solutions to the Qian-Sheng equations for the evolution of the velocity and tensor order-parameter…
With the growing maturity of additive manufacturing, the fabrication of architected or lattice-based metamaterials has become a reality for industrial applications. These materials combine lightweight design with tailored mechanical…
The effect of confinement on the orientational structure of a nematic liquid crystal model has been investigated by using a version of density-functional theory (DFT). We have focused on the case of a nematic confined by opposing flat…
Non-motile elongated bacteria confined in two-dimensional open micro-channels can exhibit collective motion and form dense monolayers with nematic order if the cells proliferate, i.e., grow and divide. Using soft molecular dynamics…
In experiments which take a liquid crystal rapidly from the isotropic to the nematic phase, a dense tangle of defects is formed. In nematics, there are in principle both line and point defects (``hedgehogs''), but no point defects are…
Cell alignment often forms nematic order, which can lead to anomalous collective cell flow due to the so-called active force. Although it is appreciated that cell migration is driven by traction force, a quantitative evaluation of the…
A two-dimensional or quasi-two-dimensional nematic liquid crystal refers to a surface confined system. When such a system is further confined by external line boundaries or excluded from internal line boundaries, the nematic directors form…
In this talk I consider a two-dimensional lattice model for liquid crystals consisting of long rods interacting via purely hard core interactions, with two allowed orientations defined by the underlying lattice. I report a rigorous proof of…
The paper is concerned with various issues surrounding the mathematical description of defects in models of liquid crystals, drawing on experience from solid mechanics. The roles played by a suitable choice of function space and by the…
A theoretical analysis is presented of a nematic liquid crystal confined between substrates pat- terned with squares that promote vertical and planar alignment. Two approaches are used to eluci- date the behavior across a wide range of…
A system of hard rigid rods of length $k$ on hypercubic lattices is known to undergo two phases transitions when chemical potential is increased: from a low density isotropic phase to an intermediate density nematic phase, and on further…
We construct generalized Hofstadter models that possess "color-entangled" flat bands and study interacting many-body states in such bands. For a system with periodic boundary conditions and appropriate interactions, there exist gapped…
In this paper we rigorously investigate the emergence of defects on Nematic Shells with genus different from one. This phenomenon is related to a non trivial interplay between the topology of the shell and the alignment of the director…
When a material surface is functionalized so as to acquire some type of order, functionalization of which soft condensed matter systems have recently provided many interesting examples, the modeller faces an alternative. Either the order is…
We use lattice Boltzmann simulations of the Beris--Edwards formulation of nematodynamics to probe the response of a nematic liquid crystal with conflicting anchoring at the boundaries under shear and Poiseuille flow. The geometry we focus…
Topological defects in nematically aligned cell populations play a critical role in modulating collective motion, from microbial colonies to epithelial tissues. Despite the potential of manipulating such topological defects to control…
A nematic membrane is a sheet with embedded orientational order, which can occur in biological cells, liquid crystal films, manufactured materials, and other soft matter systems. By formulating the free energy of nematic films using tensor…
Biological cells in living tissues form dynamic patterns with local orientational order and topological defects. Here we demonstrate an approach to produce cell monolayer with the predesigned orientational patterns using human dermal…