Related papers: Thermodynamically Stable Blue Phases
The phase diagram of ice is complex and contains many phases, but the most common (frozen water at ambient pressure, also known as Ih ice) is a non-polar material despite individual water molecules being polar1,2. Consequently, ice is not…
Present work is a theoretical study on the stability of the thermotropic biaxial nematic liquid crystal phase in model systems. Its main aim is to present the phase diagrams of spatially uniform liquid mesophases and to identify the…
This article models experimentally observed three dimensional particle-like waves that develop in nematic liquid crystals, with negative dielectric and conductive anisotropy, when subject to an applied alternating electric field. The liquid…
Dielectric nano-swithes made of the materials that exhibit piezoelectric and/or flexoelectric properties with significant electro-mechanical coupling are considered. In this case, a nonuniform strain field may locally break inversion…
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…
Noncollinear ferroic materials are sought after as testbeds to explore the intimate connections between topology and symmetry, which result in electronic, optical and magnetic functionalities not observed in collinear ferroic materials. For…
Even though chiral nematic phases were the first liquid crystals experimentally observed more than a century ago, the origin of the thermodynamic stability of cholesteric states is still unclear. In this Letter we address the problem by…
Systems involving nematic liquid crystals subjected to magnetic fields or electric fields are modeled using the Oseen-Frank macroscopic continuum theory, and general criteria are developed to assess the local stability of equilibrium…
Flexoelectricity is a form of electromechanical coupling that has recently emerged because, unlike piezoelectricity, it is theoretically possible in any dielectric material. Two-dimensional (2D) materials have also garnered significant…
Blue phases are networks of disclination lines, which occur in cholesteric liquid crystals near the transition to the isotropic phase. They have recently been used for the new generation of fast switching liquid crystal displays. Here we…
The recent discovery of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking has demonstrated the possibility of discovering the exotic textures of ferromagnetic systems in liquid crystalline fluid ferro-electrics. We show that the polar smectic mesophase…
Liquid crystal materials exhibiting up to three nematic phases are reported. Dielectric response measurements show that while the lower temperature nematic phase has ferroelectric order and the highest temperature nematic phase is apolar,…
Blue phases of cholesteric liquid crystals offer a spectacular example of naturally occurring disclination line networks. Here we numerically solve the hydrodynamic equations of motion to investigate the response of three types of blue…
Thin dielectric elastomers with compliant electrodes exhibit various types of instability under the action of electromechanical loading. Guided by the thermodynamically-based formulation of Fosdick and Tang (J. Elasticity 88, 255-297,…
The recent observation of ferroelectricity in the metastable phases of binary metal oxides, such as HfO2, ZrO2, Hf0.5Zr0.5O2, and Ga2O3, has garnered a lot of attention. These metastable ferroelectric phases are typically stabilized through…
We incorporate the effects of fluctuations in a density functional analysis of the freezing of a colloidal liquid in the presence of an external potential generated by interfering laser beams. A mean field treatment, using a density…
We report a computer simulation study on the effect of molecular structural biaxiality in the phase formation of chiral molecules. In this study, we have done coarse-grained modeling to observe self-assembled phase behavior. In our…
The balance between interfacial chemistry, electrostatics, and epitaxial strain plays a crucial role in stabilizing polarization in ferroelectric thin films. Here, we bring these contributions into competition in BiFeO$_3$ (BFO) thin films…
We study the phase diagram of a two-dimensional assembly of bosons interacting via a soft core repulsive pair potential of varying strength, and compare it to that of the equivalent system in which particles are regarded as distinguishable.…
It is shown that in perfectly quasi-isodynamic stellarators, trapped particles with a bounce frequency much higher than the frequency of the instability are stabilizing in the electrostatic and collisionless limit. The collisionless…