Related papers: Capillary and anchoring effects in thin hybrid nem…
Roughness and orientational order in thin films of anisotropic particles are investigated using kinetic Monte Carlo simulations on a cubic lattice. Anisotropic next-neighbor interactions between the lattice particles were chosen to mimic…
Consider the flow of a thin layer of non-Newtonian fluid over a solid surface. I model the case of a viscosity that depends nonlinearly on the shear-rate; power law fluids are an important example, but the analysis here is for general…
The solid nematic equivalent of the Fredericks transition is found to depend on a critical field rather than a critical voltage as in the classical case. This arises because director anchoring is principally to the solid rubbery matrix of…
We study transport and optical properties of the surface states which lie in the bulk energy gap of a thin-film topological insulator. When the film thickness is comparable with the surface state decay length into the bulk, the tunneling…
We investigate the effect of quenched surface disorder on effective interactions between two planar surfaces immersed in fluids which are near criticality and belong to the Ising bulk universality class. We consider the case that, in the…
Confinement breaks the translational symmetry of materials. Such symmetry breaking can be used to obtain configurations that are not otherwise accessible in the bulk. Here, we explore the effect of substrate-liquid interactions on the…
Even though our theoretical understanding of dendritic solidification is relatively well developed, our current ability to model this process quantitatively remains extremely limited. This is due to the fact that the morphological…
Solid-solid phase transitions are ubiquitous in nature, but the kinetic pathway of anisotropic particle systems remains elusive, where the coupling between translational and rotational motions plays a critical role in various kinetic…
Hypothesis:Diffusion in confinement is an important fundamental problem with significant implications for applications of supported liquid phases. However, resolving the spatially dependent diffusion coefficient, parallel and perpendicular…
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…
Solidification, coupled with melt flow, plays a critical role in determining the microstructure and properties of materials in several manufacturing processes. Phase-field models coupled with the Navier-Stokes equations are widely used to…
We numerically investigate the phase behavior of thick shells of cholesteric liquid crystals with tangential anchoring at the shell boundary. For achiral liquid crystal, we demonstrate a thickness-dependent transition from a configuration…
Glasses have a wide range of technological applications. The recent discovery of ultrastable glasses that are obtained by depositing the vapor of a glass-forming liquid onto the surface of a cold substrate has sparked renewed interest in…
Starting from a phase-field description of the isothermal solidification of a dilute binary alloy, we establish a model where capillary waves of the solidification front interact with the diffusive concentration field of the solute. The…
Density-functional theory is used to investigate the phase behavior of colloidal binary hard-platelet and hard-rod fluids near a single hard wall or confined in a slit pore. The Zwanzig model, in which the orientations of the particles of…
In Part II of this study we consider two cases of three-phase coexistence. First, the capped capillary may allow for vapour, drop-like, and slab-like phases to coexist at the same values of temperature and chemical potential. Second, the…
Hypothesis: Lateral accumulation and film defects during drying of hard particle coatings is a common problem, typically solved using polymeric additives and surface active ingredients, which require further processing of the dried film.…
We investigate the kinetics of phase separation for a mixture of rodlike viruses (fd) and polymer (dextran), which effectively constitutes a system of attractive rods. This dispersion is quenched from a flow-induced fully nematic state into…
We investigate theoretically the wetting properties of cholesteric liquid crystals at a planar substrate. If the properties of substrate and of the interface are such that the cholesteric layers are not distorted the wetting properties are…
We investigate, using Monte Carlo simulations, the phase diagram of a system of hard rectangles of size $m\times mk$ on a square lattice when the aspect ratio $k$ is a non-integer. The existence of a disordered isotropic phase, a nematic…