Related papers: Switching and defect dynamics in multistable liqui…
Nematic liquid crystal (LC) is a partially ordered matter that has been a popular model system for studying a variety of topological behaviors in condensed matter. In this work, utilizing a spontaneously twisting achiral LC, we introduce a…
Many processes in chemistry, physics, and biology involve rare events in which the system escapes from a metastable state by surmounting an activation barrier. Examples range from chemical reactions, protein folding, and nucleation events…
We investigate the phase behavior of a single-component system in 3 dimensions with spherically-symmetric, pairwise-additive, soft-core interactions with an attractive well at a long distance, a repulsive soft-core shoulder at an…
Research on transport, self-assembly and defect dynamics within confined, flowing liquid crystals requires versatile and computationally efficient mesoscopic algorithms to account for fluctuating nematohydrodynamic interactions. We present…
Various active materials exhibit strong spatio-temporal variability of their orientational order known as active turbulence, characterised by irregular and chaotic motion of topological defects, including colloidal suspensions,…
We investigate experimentally and numerically the defect configurations emerging when a cholesteric liquid crystal is confined to a spherical shell. We uncover a rich scenario of defect configurations, some of them non-existent in nematic…
Additive noise is known to produce counter-intuitive behaviors in nonlinear dynamical systems. Previously, it was shown that systems with a deterministic limit cycle can display bistable switching between metastable states in the presence…
We consider the dynamics of thin two-dimensional viscous droplets on chemically heterogeneous surfaces moving under the combined effects of slip, mass transfer and capillarity. The resulting long-wave evolution equation for the droplet…
We develop a formal analogy between configurational stresses in two distinct physical systems, and study the flows that they induce when the configurations of interest include topological de- fects. The two systems in question are…
The dynamic transition between the ordered flow and the plastic flow is studied for a two-dimensional driven vortex lattice, in the presence of sharp and dense pinning centers, from numerical simulations. For this system, which does not…
The translational order in a three-dimensional lattice pinned by hopping defects is studied. It is suggested that the equilibrium state of the lattice crosses from a glass to a crystal on the rate of hopping. It is argued that such a…
Topological defects resulted from boundary constraints in confined liquid crystals have attracted extensive research interests. In this paper, we use numerical simulation to study the phase transition dynamics in the context of stochastic…
We consider the flotation of deformable, non-wetting drops on a liquid interface. We consider the deflection of both the liquid interface and the droplet itself in response to the buoyancy forces, density difference and the various surface…
Different liquid crystalline phases with long-range orientational but not positional order, so-called nematic phases, are scarce. It rarely occurs that a new nematic phase is discovered and such event is inevitably accompanied by a great…
Field theories predict that phase transitions sequentially breaking continuous and discrete symmetries can generate hybrid topological structures in which defects of different dimensionalities merge. We report experimental and numerical…
A surface in contact with the isotropic phase of a passive liquid crystal can induce nematic order over distances that range from microscopic to macroscopic when the nematic-isotropic interface undergoes an orientational-wetting transition.…
Motivated by the observation of highly unstable flowing states in suspensions of microtubules and kinesin, we analyze a model of mutually-propelled filaments suspended in a solvent. The system undergoes a mean-field isotropic-nematic…
Phase-ordering dynamics in nematic liquid crystals has been the subject of much active investigation in recent years in theory, experiments and simulations. With a rapid quench from the isotropic to nematic phase a large number of…
The element of metastability is incorporated in the fluctuating nonlinear hydrodynamic description of the mode coupling theory (MCT) of the liquid-glass transition. This is achieved through the introduction of the defect density variable…
Liquid crystal elastomers are cross-linked elastomer networks with liquid crystal mesogens incorporated into the main or side chain. Polydomain liquid crystalline (nematic) elastomers exhibit unusual mechanical properties like soft…