Related papers: Interactions of distinct quadrupolar nematic collo…
We consider a microscopic field theoretical approach for interacting active nematic particles. With only steric interactions the self-propulsion strength in such systems can lead to different collective behaviour, e.g., synchronized…
We consider a nematic liquid crystal occupying the exterior region in R^3 outside of a spherical particle, with radial strong anchoring. Within the context of the Landau-de Gennes theory, we study minimizers subject to a strong external…
The possibility to induce demixing in a colloidal mixture by adding small polymers, or other equivalent depletant agents, is theoretically investigated. By use of Mean Field Theory, suitably generalized to deal with short range effective…
Influences of nonlinear screening on effective interactions between spherical macroions in charged colloids are described via response theory. Nonlinear screening, in addition to generating effective many-body interactions, is shown to…
We present a general theory of liquid crystals under inhomogeneous electric field in a Ginzburg-Landau scheme. The molecular orientation can be deformed by electric field when the dielectric tensor is orientation-dependent. We then…
Different liquid crystalline phases with long-range orientational but not positional order, so-called nematic phases, are scarce. It rarely occurs that a new nematic phase is discovered and such event is inevitably accompanied by a great…
The phase behaviour of colloidal dispersions is interesting for fundamental reasons and for technological applications such as photonic crystals and electronic paper. Sedimentation, which in everyday life is relevant from blood analysis to…
Mono-layers of stearic and behenic acids deposited with the Langmuir-Blodgett technique, were used as aligning films in nematic liquid crystal cells. During the filling process the liquid crystal adopts a deformed quasi-planar alignment…
We study the phase ordering colloids suspended in a thermotropic nematic liquid crystal below the clearing point Tni and the resulting aggregated structure. Small (150nm) PMMA particles are dispersed in a classical liquid crystal matrix,…
Outermost occupied electron shells of chemical elements can have symmetries resembling that of monopoles, dipoles, quadrupoles and octupoles corresponding to filled s-, p-, d- and forbitals. Theoretically, elements with hexadecapolar outer…
Defects arise when nematic liquid crystals are under topological constraints at the boundary. Recently the study of defects has drawn a lot of attention. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between two-dimensional defects and…
We show by means of continuum theory and simulations that geometric percolation in uniaxial nematics of hard slender particles is fundamentally different from that in isotropic dispersions. In the nematic, percolation depends only very…
The effective interaction between charged colloidal particles confined between two planar like-charged walls is investigated using computer simulations of the primitive model describing asymmetric electrolytes. In detail, we calculate the…
We propose a simple surface potential favoring the planar degenerate anchoring of nematic liquid crystals, i.e., the tendency of the molecules to align parallel to one another along any direction parallel to the surface. We show that, at…
The phase behavior of colloid-polymer mixtures, and of solutions of globular proteins, is often interpreted in terms of a simple model of hard spheres with short-ranged attraction. While such a model yields a qualitative understanding of…
Mono-layers of stearic and behenic acids and mixtures of them in different proportions, deposited with the Langmuir-Blodgett technique, were used to study the alignment and the alignment dynamics in nematic liquid crystal cells. A…
Within the framework of Landau-de Gennes theory for nematic liquid crystals, we study the temperature-induced isotropic-nematic phase transition on a spherical shell. Below a critical temperature, a thin layer of nematic coating a…
Within a general framework we study the effective, deformation-induced interaction between two colloids trapped at a fluid interface. As an application, we consider the interface deformation owing to the electrostatic field of charged…
The elastic interactions between objects embedded in a nematic liquid crystal are usually caused by the average distorsion-rather than by the fluctuations-of the nematic orientational field. We argue that for sufficiently small particles,…
Liquid crystalline media mediate interactions between suspended particles and confining geometries, which not only has potential to guide patterning and bottom-up colloidal assembly, but can also control colloidal migration in microfluidic…