Related papers: Liquid crystals boojum-colloids
Colloidal gels are prime examples of functional materials exhibiting disordered, amorphous, yet meta-stable forms. They maintain stability through short-range attractive forces and their material properties are tunable by external forces.…
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,…
The progress of realizing colloidal structures mimicking natural forms of organization in condensed matter is inherently limited by the availability of suitable colloidal building blocks. To enable new forms of crystalline and…
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…
Orientational and positional ordering properties of liquid crystal monolayers are examined by means of Fundamental-Measure Density Functional Theory. Particles forming the monolayer are modeled as hard parallelepipeds of square section of…
Active motion at complex fluid-fluid interfaces is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature. However, an intriguing question that is not fully addressed is how active motion affects and gets influenced by its complex environment. Here, we design a…
Van der Waals heterostructures have been lately intensively studied because they offer a large variety of properties that can be controlled by selecting 2D materials and their sequence in the stack. The exact arrangement of the layers as…
Structural correlations between colloids in a binary mixture of charged and uncharged spheres are calculated using computer simulations of the primitive model with explicit microions. For aqueous suspensions in a solvent of large dielectric…
Abundant in nature, colloids also find increasingly important applications in science and technology, ranging from direct probing of kinetics in crystals and glasses to fabrication of third-generation quantum-dot solar cells. Because…
Disclination configurations of a nematic liquid crystal are studied within a self-consistent molecular field theory. The theory is based on a tensor order parameter, and can accommodate anisotropic elastic energies without the known…
Colloidal particles disturb the alignment of rod-like molecules of liquid crystals, giving rise to long-range interactions that minimize the free energy of distorted regions. Particle shape and topology are known to guide this self-assembly…
The Landau-de Gennes free energy is used to calculate the interaction between long cylindrical colloids and the nematic-isotropic (NI) interface. This interaction has two contributions: one is specific of liquid crystals and results from…
Crystal defects crucially influence the properties of crystalline materials and have been extensively studied. Even for the simplest type of defect - the point defect - however, basic properties such as their diffusive behavior, and their…
We examine the organization and dynamics of binary colloidal monolayers composed of micron-scale silica particles interspersed with smaller-diameter silica particles that serve as minority component impurities. These binary monolayers are…
We study mutual alignment and interactions between colloidal particles of dissimilar shapes and dimensions when dispersed in a nematic host fluid. Convex pentagonal and concave starfruit-shaped nanoprisms and microspheres induce dipolar or…
Convergent beam electron diffraction (CBED) performed on two-dimensional (2D) materials recently emerged as a powerful tool to study structural and stacking defects, adsorbates, atomic 3D displacements in the layers, and the interlayer…
Colloidal particles trapped at an interface between two fluids can form a wide range of different structures. Replacing one of the fluid with a liquid crystal increases the complexity of interactions and results in a greater range of…
Colloidal particles suspended in liquid crystals can exhibit various effective anisotropic interactions that can be tuned and utilized in self-assembly processes. We simulate a two-dimensional system of hard disks suspended in a solution of…
Using laser tweezers and fluorescence confocal polarizing microscopy, we study colloidal interactions of solid microspheres in the nematic bulk caused by elastic distortions around the particles with strong tangential surface anchoring. The…
We use a two-dimensional (2D) elastic free energy to calculate the effective interaction between two circular disks immersed in smectic-$C$ films. For strong homeotropic anchoring, the distortion of the director field caused by the disks…