Related papers: Texture and shape of two-dimensional domains of ne…
Nematic shells are colloidal particles coated with nematic liquid crystal molecules which may freely glide and rotate on the colloid's surface while keeping their long axis on the local tangent plane. We describe the nematic order on a…
From the mitotic spindle up to tissues and biofilms, many biological systems behave as active droplets, which often break symmetry and change shape spontaneously. Here, I show that active nematic droplets can experience a fingering…
We theoretically investigate supersolidity in three-dimensional dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates. We focus on the role of trap geometry in determining the dimensionality of the resulting droplet arrays, which range from one-dimensional to…
Motivated by recent experiments on multi-component membranes, the growth kinetics of domains on vesicles is theoretically studied. It is known that the steady-state rate of coalescence cannot be obtained by taking the long-time limit of the…
The assembly of colloids in nematic liquid crystals via topological defects has been extensively studied for spherical particles, and investigations of other colloid shapes have revealed a wide array of new assembly behaviors. We show,…
We propose a theoretical framework to predict the three-dimensional shapes of optically deformed micron-sized emulsion droplets with ultra-low interfacial tension. The resulting shape and size of the droplet arises out of a balance between…
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…
We use a variational principle to derive a mathematical model for a nematic electrolyte in which the liquid crystalline component is described in terms of a second-rank order tensor. The model extends the previously developed director-based…
A computational study of morphological instabilities of a two-dimensional nematic front under directional growth was performed using a Landau-de Gennes type quadrupolar tensor order parameter model for the first-order isotropic/nematic…
A spontaneous buckling transition in thin layers of monodomain nematic liquid crystalline gel was observed by polarized light microscopy. The coupling between the orientational ordering of liquid crystalline solvent and the translational…
Defects in liquid crystals are of great practical importance and theoretical interest. Despite tremendous efforts, predicting the location and transition of defects under various topological constraint and external field remains to be a…
We study two-dimensional equilibrium configurations of nematic liquid crystal (NLC) director in a cell confined between two parallel surfaces: a planar surface and a spatially modulated one. The relief of the modulated surface is described…
Nematic solids respond strongly to changes in ambient heat or light, significantly differently parallel and perpendicular to the director. This phenomenon is well characterized for uniform director fields, but not for defect textures. We…
Recent theoretical research has developed a general framework to understand director deformations and modulated phases in nematic liquid crystals. In this framework, there are four fundamental director deformation modes: twist, bend, splay,…
In experiments, an individual chemically active liquid crystal (LC) droplet submerged in the bulk of a surfactant solution may self-propel along a straight, helical, or random trajectory. In this paper, we develop a minimal model capturing…
Particle tracking with a 0.98$\mu$m silica sphere is used in determining precessional motion of nematic director in nematic phase of 8CB liquid crystals, as it probes those oriented structures which are of the same wavelength as of the…
A state of matter in which molecules show a long-range orientational order and no positional order is called a nematic liquid crystal. The best known and most widely used (for example, in modern displays) is the uniaxial nematic, with the…
We treat the problem of characterizing in a systematic way the qualitative features of two-dimensional dynamical systems. To that end, we construct a representation of the topological features of phase portraits by means of diagrams that…
Toroidal nematics are droplets of nematic liquid crystals in the form of a circular torus. When the nematic director is subject to planar degenerate boundary conditions, the bend-only director field with vector lines along the parallels of…
This article introduces a novel method for the implementation of shape optimisation with Lipschitz domains. We propose to use the shape derivative to determine deformation fields which represent steepest descent directions of the shape…