Related papers: Liquid crystal anchoring transitions on aligning s…
Partially wetting nematic liquid crystal (NLC) films on substrates are unstable to dewetting-type instabilities due to destablizing solid/NLC interaction forces. These instabilities are modified by the nematic nature of the films, which…
Cholesteric Liquid Crystals (CLCs), subject to externally applied magnetic fields and confined between two parallel planar surfaces with strong homeotropic anchoring conditions, are found to undergo transitions to different types of…
We describe electrophoresis of spherical dielectric particles in a uniformly aligned nematic medium with a negative dielectric anisotropy. A spherical particle that orients the liquid crystal (LC) perpendicularly to its surface moves under…
A nematic liquid crystal (NLC) layer with the anisotropy axis modulated at a fixed rate q in the transverse direction is considered. If the layer locally constitutes a half-wave plate, then the thin-screen approximation predicts 100%…
McMillan liquid crystal model sandwiched between strong homeotropic anchoring walls is studied. Phase transitions between isotropic, nematic, and smectic A phases are investigated for wide ranges of an interaction parameter and of the…
Computer simulations are presented of the isotropic-to-nematic transition in a liquid crystal confined between two parallel plates a distance H apart. The plates are neutral and do not impose any anchoring on the particles. Depending on the…
We investigate the origin of secondary disclinations that were recently described as a new evidence of a biaxial nematic phase in an oxadiazole bent-core thermotropic liquid crystal C7. With an assortment of optical techniques such as…
Microbullet particles, cylinders with one blunt and one spherical end, offer a novel platform to study the effects of anisotropy and curvature on colloidal assembly in complex fluids. Here, we disperse microbullets in…
We provide experimental evidence that photoalignment at the nematic liquid crystal (NLC) - polymer interface can not be simply considered as a two-dimensional process. Moreover, our experiments clearly indicate that the photoaligning…
The effect of rough walls on the phase behaviour of a confined liquid crystal (LC) fluid is studied using constant pressure Monte Carlo simulations. The LC is modelled as a fluid of soft ellipsoidal molecules and the rough walls are…
Controlling the anchoring of liquid crystal molecules at an interface with a water solution influences the entire organization of the underlying liquid crystal phase, which is crucial for many applications. The simplest way to stabilize…
In this paper we investigate the dynamics of liquid crystal textures in a two-dimensional nematic under applied electric fields, using numerical simulations performed using a publicly available LIquid CRystal Algorithm (LICRA) developed by…
Nematic liquid crystals at rough and fluctuating interfaces are analyzed within the Frank elastic theory and the Landau-de Gennes theory. We study specifically interfaces that locally favor planar anchoring. In the first part we reconsider…
It is well known that the alignment of liquid crystals can be realized by rubbing or photoalignment technologies. Recently nonlinear laser lithography was introduced as a fast, relatively low-cost method for large area nano-grating…
Cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) have a characteristic length scale given by the pitch of the twisted stacking of their constituent rod-like molecules. Under homeotropic anchoring conditions where the molecules prefer to orient…
We explore the diffusion dynamics of a Brownian microparticle in a lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal (LCLC). In the planarly oriented nematic phase, the microparticle exhibits levitation and anisotropic two-dimensional diffusion. Upon…
We investigate the orientational behaviour of a homeotropically aligned nematic liquid crystal subjected to an oscillatory plane Poiseuille flow produced by an alternating pressure gradient. For small pressure amplitudes the director…
Electrically induced reorientation of nematic liquid crystal (NLC) molecules caused by dielectric anisotropy of the material is a fundamental phenomenon widely used in modern technologies. Its Achilles heel is a slow (millisecond)…
Spontaneous onset of a low temperature topologically ordered phase in a 2-dimensional (2D) lattice model of uniaxial liquid crystal (LC) was debated extensively pointing to a suspected underlying mechanism affecting the RG flow near the…
We use the Parsons Lee modification of Onsagers second virial theory within the restricted orientation approximation to analyse the phase behaviour of hard cylindrical rods confined in narrow pores Depending on the wall to wall separation…