Related papers: Surface free energies for nematic shells
The paper is concerned with various issues surrounding the mathematical description of defects in models of liquid crystals, drawing on experience from solid mechanics. The roles played by a suitable choice of function space and by the…
Continuum models of active nematic gels have proved successful to describe a number of biological systems consisting of a population of rodlike motile subunits in a fluid environment. However, in order to get a thorough understanding of the…
We construct a tensor model for nematic phases of bent-core molecules from molecular theory. The form of free energy is determined by molecular symmetry, which includes the couplings and derivatives of a vector and two second-order tensors,…
We characterize the elastic contribution to the surface free energy of a nematic in presence of a sawtooth substrate. Our findings are based on numerical minimization of the Landau-de Gennes model and analytical calculations on the…
In this paper we present a generalization of Berreman's model for the elastic contribution to the surface free-energy density of a nematic liquid crystal in presence of a sawtooth substrate which favours homeotropic anchoring, as a function…
I put forward a continuum theory for active nematic gels, defined as fluids or suspensions of orientable rodlike objects endowed with active dynamics, that is based on symmetry arguments and compatibility with thermodynamics. The starting…
We investigate theoretically the morphology of a thin nematic film adsorbed at flat substrate patterned by stripes with alternating aligning properties, normal and tangential respectively. We construct a simple "exactly-solvable" effective…
We have studied the structure and free energy landscape of a semi-flexible lattice-polymer in the presence of a surface. At low temperatures coexistence of two-dimensional integer-folded crystals is observed. As the temperature is increased…
We derive a F\"{o}ppl-von K\'{a}rm\'{a}n-type constitutive model for solid liquid crystalline plates where the nematic director may or may not rotate freely relative to the elastic network. To obtain the reduced two-dimensional model, we…
This article re-examines a classic question in liquid-crystal physics: What are the elastic modes of a nematic liquid crystal? The analysis uses a recent mathematical construction, which breaks the director gradient tensor into four…
Although free electron models have been established in order to capture the essential physics of interfacial and bulk properties in metals, some issues still remain regarding the application of free electron models to thin metal films. One…
We have studied the nucleation and the physical properties of a -1/2 wedge disclination line near the free surface of a confined nematic liquid crystal. The position of the disclination line has been related to the material parameters…
A micrometer-scale elastic shell immersed in a nematic liquid crystal may be deformed by the host if the cost of deformation is comparable to the cost of elastic deformation of the nematic. Moreover, such inclusions interact and form chains…
Nematic liquid crystals exhibit configurations in which the underlying ordering changes markedly on macroscopic length scales. Such structures include topological defects in the nematic phase and tactoids within nematic-isotropic…
Lipid membrane with freely exposed edge is regarded as smooth surface with curved boundary. Exterior differential forms are introduced to describe the surface and the boundary curve. The total free energy is defined as the sum of Helfrich's…
After a brief introduction to several variational problems in the study of shapes of thin thickness structures, we deal with variational problems on 2-dimensional surface in 3-dimensional Euclidian space by using exterior differential…
The ground state of twist-bend nematic liquid crystals is a heliconical molecular arrangement in which the nematic director precesses uniformly about an axis, making a fixed angle with it. Both precession senses are allowed in the ground…
Surface-induced profiles of both nematic and smectic order parameters in a nematic liquid crystal, ranging from an orienting substrate to "infinity", were evaluated numerically on base of an extended Landau theory. In order to obtain a…
Anisotropic fluids appear in a diverse array of systems, from liquid-crystal displays to bacterial swarms, and are characterized by orientational order. Large colloidal particles immersed in such environments disturb the medium's…
Starting from a three-dimensional description of an active nematic layer, we employ an asymptotic theory to derive a series of low-dimensional continuum models that capture the coupled dynamics of flat and curved films, including variations…