Related papers: Interactions of distinct quadrupolar nematic collo…
In an elegant paper, D. Nelson suggested a method to produce tetravalent colloids based on a tetrahedral configuration created on the surface of a spherical particle. It emerges from a two-dimensional nematic liquid crystal placed on a…
We study the pair interaction of charged silica microrods in chiral nematic liquid crystals and show that the microrods with homeotropic surface anchoring form a bound state due to the competing effect of electrostatic (Coulomb) and elastic…
Colloidal systems find important applications ranging from fabrication of photonic crystals to direct probing of phenomena typically encountered in atomic crystals and glasses. New applications - such as nanoantennas, plasmonic sensors, and…
We study the effective electrostatic interactions between a pair of charged colloidal particles without salt ions while the system is confined in two dimensions. In particular we use a simplified model to elucidate the effects of rotational…
We investigate the phase behavior of colloidal suspensions of board-like particles under the effect of an external field and assess the still disputed occurrence of the biaxial nematic (N$_\text{B}$) liquid crystal phase. The external field…
We investigate effective interactions between a colloidal particle, immersed in a binary mixture of smaller spheres, and a semipermeable membrane. The colloid is modeled as a big hard sphere and the membrane is represented as an infinitely…
Nematic twist--bend is the fifth nematic phase recognized in nature. This phase exhibits spiral orientational order, thus it is a chiral structure and it can be stabilized in systems composed of achiral molecules. The microscopic origin of…
Since the early observation of nematic phases of disc-like clay colloids by Langmuir in 1938, the phase behaviour of such systems has resisted theoretical understanding. The main reason is that there is no satisfactory generalization for…
We give a brief introduction to a divergence penalized Landau-de Gennes functional as a toy model for the study of nematic liquid crystal with colloid inclusion, in the case of unequal elastic constants. We assume that the nematic occupies…
Aqueous dispersions of exfoliated, bile-salt stabilized single-wall carbon nanotubes exhibit a first order transition to a nematic liquid-crystalline phase. The nematic phase presents itself in the form of micron-sized nematic droplets also…
Monte Carlo simulation performed on a lattice system of biaxial molecules possessing $D_{2h}$ symmetry and interacting with a second rank anisotropic dispersion potential yields three distinct macroscopic phases depending on the biaxiality…
Field-induced reorientation of colloidal particles is especially relevant to manipulate the optical properties of a nanomaterial for target applications. We have recently shown that surprisingly feeble external stimuli are able to transform…
Molecules of a nematic liquid crystal respond to an applied magnetic field by reorienting themselves in the direction of the field. Since the dielectric anisotropy of a nematic is small, it takes relatively large fields to elicit a…
We study elastic interactions between colloidal particles and deformation landscapes of undulations in a cholesteric liquid crystal under an electric field applied normal to cholesteric layers. The onset of undulation instability is…
We investigate experimentally and numerically the defect configurations emerging when a cholesteric liquid crystal is confined to a spherical shell. We uncover a rich scenario of defect configurations, some of them non-existent in nematic…
The bent-core liquid crystals (LCs) are highly regarded as the next-generation materials for electro-optic devices. The nematic (N) phase of these LCs possesses highly ordered smectic-like cybotactic clusters which are promising in terms of…
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…
Liquid crystals establish a nearly unique combination of thermodynamic, hydrodynamic, and topological behavior. This poses a challenge to their theoretical understanding and modeling. The arena where these effects come together is the…
Entropic forces in colloidal suspensions and in polymer-colloid systems are of long-standing and continuing interest. Experiments show how entropic forces can be used to control the self-assembly of colloidal particles. Significant advances…
In nodal-line semimetals, Coulomb interactions and short-range correlated disorder are both marginal perturbations to the clean non-interacting Hamiltonian. We analyze their interplay using a weak-coupling renormalization group approach. In…