Related papers: Orientability and energy minimization in liquid cr…
We consider nematic liquid crystals in a bounded, convex polyhedron described by a director field n(r) subject to tangent boundary conditions. We derive lower bounds for the one-constant elastic energy in terms of topological invariants.…
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…
In this article we discuss nonstationary models for inhomogeneous liquid crystals driven out of equilibrium by flow. Emphasis is put on those models which are used in the mathematics as well as in the physics literature, the overall goal…
We investigate the asymptotic behaviour of a correlation function associated with a nematic liquid crystal system undergoing an isotropic-nematic phase transition following an instantaneous change of temperature. Within the setting of…
How condensed-matter simulations depend on the number of molecules being simulated ($N$) is sometimes itself a valuable piece of information. Liquid crystals provide a case in point. Light scattering and $2d$-IR experiments on…
The optical properties of liquid crystals serve as the basis for display, diagnostic, and sensing technologies. Such properties are generally controlled by relying on electric fields. In this work, we investigate the effects of microfluidic…
This paper is concerned with the rigorous analysis of a recently proposed model of Zheng et. al. for describing nematic liquid crystals within the dense regime, with the orientation distribution function as the variable. A key feature of…
In this study a variable capacitor made of Nematic Liquid Crystal cell is proposed and analyzed theoretically. The mutual capacitance is steered with an optical beam of a Gaussian shape launched into the cell. The optical field changes the…
We construct a phenomenological Landau-de Gennes theory for hard colloidal rods by performing an order parameter expansion of the chemical-potential dependent grand potential. By fitting the coefficients to known results of Onsager theory,…
Recent experiments report that the long looked for thermotropic biaxial nematic phase has been finally detected in some thermotropic liquid crystalline systems. Inspired by these experimental observations we concentrate on some elementary…
Liquid crystal networks exploit the coupling between the responsivity of liquid-crystalline mesogens, e.g., to electric fields, and the (visco)elastic properties of a polymer network. Because of this, these materials have been put forward…
We consider a one-dimensional variational problem arising in connection with a model for cholesteric liquid crystals. The principal feature of our study is the assumption that the twist deformation of the nematic director incurs much higher…
The Landau-de Gennes free energy is used to study theoretically the effective interaction of a spherical "key" and an anisotropic "lock" colloidal particles. We assume identical anchoring properties of the surfaces of the key and of the…
We classify (0,2) Landau-Ginzburg theories that can flow to compact IR fixed points with equal left and right central charges strictly bounded by 3. Our result is a (0,2) generalization of the ADE classification of (2,2) Landau-Ginzburg…
The general Ericksen-Leslie system for the flow of nematic liquid crystals is reconsidered in the non-isothermal case aiming for thermodynamically consistent models. The non-isothermal model is then investigated analytically. A fairly…
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…
The planar bistable device [Tsakonas \textit{et al., Appl. Phys. Lett.}, 2007, {\textbf{90}}, 111913] is known to have two distinct classes of stable equilibria: the diagonal and rotated solutions. We model this device within the…
We analyze an elastic surface energy which was recently introduced by G. Napoli and L.Vergori to model thin films of nematic liquid crystals. We show how a novel approach that takes into account also the extrinsic properties of the surfaces…
We study a simplified system of the original Ericksen--Leslie equations for the flow of nematic liquid crystals. This is a coupled non-parabolic dissipative dynamic system. We show the convergence of global classical solutions to single…
We model nematic liquid crystal configurations inside three-dimensional prisms, with a polygonal cross-section and Dirichlet boundary conditions on all prism surfaces. We work in a reduced Landau-de Gennes framework, and the Dirichlet…