Related papers: Texture and shape of two-dimensional domains of ne…
There is a recent interest in studying odd elasticity in soft solids. Current focus has been on simple solids. However, many soft solids are structured and can exhibit nematic elasticity or viscoelasticity. Here we generalize the concept of…
We summarise some recent results on solution landscapes for two-dimensional (2D) problems in the Landau--de Gennes theory for nematic liquid crystals. We study energy-minimizing and non energy-minimizing solutions of the Euler--Lagrange…
In this work we numerically study the switching dynamics of a 2D cholesteric emulsion droplet immersed in an isotropic fluid under an electric field, which is either uniform or rotating with constant speed. The overall dynamics depend…
The translation and shape deformations of a passive viscous Newtonian droplet immersed in an active nematic liquid crystal under circular confinement are analyzed using a linear stability analysis. We focus on the case of a sharply aligned…
When nematic liquid crystals are embedded in random polymer networks, the disordered environment disrupts the long-range order, producing a glassy state. If an electric field is applied, it induces large and fairly temperature-independent…
Topological defects are an essential part of the structure and dynamics of all liquid crystals, and they are particularly important in experiments and simulations on active liquid crystals. In a recent paper, Vromans and Giomi [Soft Matter,…
The isotropic to ferroelectric nematic liquid transition had been theoretically studied over one hundred years ago, but its experimental studies are rare. Here we present polarizing optical microscopy studies and theoretical considerations…
Handedness of the director twist in cholesteric liquid crystals is commonly assumed to be the same throughout the medium, determined solely by the chirality of constituent molecules or chiral additives, albeit distortions of the…
The optical properties of liquid crystals serve as the basis for display, diagnostic, and sensing technologies. Such properties are generally controlled by relying on electric fields. In this work, we investigate the effects of microfluidic…
We study transformations of self-organized defect arrays at the nematic-smectic A liquid crystal phase transition, and show that these defect configurations are correlated, or "remembered", across the phase transition. A thin film of…
Active forces occurring within cells can drive crucial biological processes that involve spontaneous organization and shape change, such as cell division. Motivated by recent in vitro experiments of nematic droplets of cytoskeletal…
Atomically thin 2-dimensional heterostructures are a promising, novel class of materials with groundbreaking properties. The possiblity of choosing the many constituent components and their proportions allows optimizing these materials to…
Topological defects play a pivotal role in the physics of liquid crystals and represent one of the most prominent and well studied aspects of mesophases. While in two-dimensional nematics, disclinations are traditionally treated as…
In this paper, the two-dimensional pure bending of a hyperelastic substrate coated by a nematic liquid crystal elastomer (abbreviated as NLCE) is studied within the framework of nonlinear elasticity. The governing system, arising from the…
In this paper, we introduce a new shape functional defined for toroidal domains that we call harmonic helicity, and study its shape optimization. Given a toroidal domain, we consider its associated harmonic field. The latter is the magnetic…
A promising approach in designing composite materials with unusual physical behavior combines solid nanostructures and orientationally ordered soft matter at the mesoscale. Such composites not only inherit properties of their constituents…
Shape calculus concerns the calculation of directional derivatives of some quantity of interest, typically expressed as an integral. This article introduces a type of shape calculus based on localized dilation of boundary faces through…
We report the experimental determination of the structure and response to applied electric field of the lower-temperature nematic phase of the previously reported calamitic compound 4-[(4-nitrophenoxy)carbonyl]phenyl2,4-dimethoxybenzoate…
Manipulating the shape of a liquid droplet is essential for a wide range of applications in medicine and industry. However, existing methods are typically limited to generating simple shapes, such as ellipses, or rely on predefined…
Using a hydrodynamic theory that incorporates a momentum decay mechanism, we calculate the drag coefficient of a circular liquid domain of finite viscosity moving in a two-dimensional membrane. We derive an analytical expression for the…