Related papers: Surface free energies for nematic shells
Nematic liquid crystals in a polyhedral domain, a prototype for bistable displays, may be described by a unit-vector field subject to tangent boundary conditions. Here we consider the case of a rectangular prism. For configurations with…
Motivated by problems arising in tear film dynamics, we present a model for the extensional flow of thin sheets of nematic liquid crystal. The rod-like molecules of these substances impart an elastic contribution to its response. We rescale…
Recent experiments on vesicles formed from block copolymers with liquid-crystalline side-chains reveal a rich variety of vesicle morphologies. The additional internal order ("structure") developed by these self-assembled block copolymer…
Uniaxial nematic liquid crystals whose molecular orientation is subjected to a tangential anchoring on a curved surface offer a non trivial interplay between the geometry and the topology of the surface and the orientational degree of…
We connect the theories of the deformation of elastic surfaces and phase surfaces arising in the description of almost periodic patterns. In particular, we show parallels between asymptotic expansions for the energy of elastic surfaces in…
The entropy of a polymer confined in a curved surface and the elastic free energy of a membrane consisting of polymers are obtained by scaling analysis. It is found that the elastic free energy of the membrane has the form of the in-plane…
We have calculated the phase diagrams of one--component fluids made of five types of biaxial particles differing in their cross sections. The orientation of the principal particle axis is fixed in space, while the second axis is allowed to…
In this paper, we study an elastic bilayer plate composed of a nematic liquid crystal elastomer in the top layer and a nonlinearly elastic material in the bottom layer. While the bottom layer is assumed to be stress-free in the flat…
The emergence of nematic order on deformable closed surfaces plays a pivotal role in the morphogenesis of active biological matter, such as the regeneration of Hydra. In this work, we present a continuum model that couples the…
A two-dimensional or quasi-two-dimensional nematic liquid crystal refers to a surface confined system. When such a system is further confined by external line boundaries or excluded from internal line boundaries, the nematic directors form…
We study the global influence of curvature on the free energy landscape of two-dimensional binary mixtures confined on closed surfaces. Starting from a generic effective free energy, constructed on the basis of symmetry considerations and…
Force-free current sheets are local plasma structures with field-aligned electric currents and approximately uniform plasma pressures. Such structures, widely found throughout the heliosphere, are sites for plasma instabilities and magnetic…
We explore reshaping of nematoelastic films upon imbibing an isotropic solvent under conditions when isotropic and nematic phases coexist. The structure of the interphase boundary is computed taken into account the optimal nematic…
We develop a theory of axisymmetric surfaces minimizing a combination of surface tension and nematic elastic energies which may be suitable for describing simple film and bubble shapes. As a function of the elastic constant and the applied…
Here we discuss the free energy of nematic liquid crystals using two vectors and the helicity, with the aim of having a compact form of its density. The two vectors are due to the splay and bend distortions of the director field. They have…
Instabilities in thin elastic sheets, such as wrinkles, are of broad interest both from a fundamental viewpoint and also because of their potential for engineering applications. Nematic liquid crystal elastomers offer a new form of control…
From incompressible flows to electrostatics, harmonic functions can provide solutions to many two-dimensional problems and, similarly, the director field of a planar nematic can be determined using complex analysis. We derive a closed-form…
Active nematics are influenced by alignment angle singularities called topological defects. The localization of these defects is of major interest for biological applications. The total distortion of alignment angles due to defects is…
We derive a class of two-dimensional shell energies for thin elastic bodies exhibiting small-length scale effects modeled via strain-gradient elasticity. Building on the final author's earlier work on plate models, the kinetic and stored…
We introduce a shell-model theory that combines traditional spherical states, which yield a diagonal representation of the usual single-particle interaction, with collective configurations that track deformations, and test the validity of…