Related papers: Interactions of distinct quadrupolar nematic collo…
Surface effects are generally prevailing in confined colloidal systems. Here we report on dispersed nanoparticles close to a fluid membrane. Exact results regarding the static organization are derived for a dilute solution of non-adhesive…
Colloidal particles in a liquid crystal (LC) behave very differently from their counterparts in isotropic fluids. Elastic nature of the orientational order and surface anchoring of the director cause long-range anisotropic interactions and…
There is considerable interest in understanding and controlling topological defects in nematic liquid crystals (LCs). Confinement, in the form of droplets, has been particularly effective in that regard. Here, we employ the Landau-de Gennes…
The emergence of nematic order on deformable closed surfaces plays a pivotal role in the morphogenesis of active biological matter, such as the regeneration of Hydra. In this work, we present a continuum model that couples the…
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…
We apply a phenomenological theory of polar liquids to calculate the interaction energy between two plane surfaces at nm-distances. We show that depending on the properties of the surface-liquid interfaces, the interacting surfaces induce…
In this paper we revisit the problem of a nematic liquid crystal in contact with patterned substrates. The substrate is modelled as a periodic array of parallel infinite grooves of well-defined cross section sculpted on a chemically…
Recently, it was observed that water droplets suspended in a nematic liquid crystal form linear chains (Poulin et al., Science 275, 1770 (1997)). The chaining occurs, e.g., in a large nematic drop with homeotropic boundary conditions at all…
A theoretical study is presented of surface waves at a monomolecular surfactant film between an isotropic liquid and a nematic liquid crystal for the case when the surfactant film is in the isotropic two-dimensional fluid phase and induces…
We investigate condensation of a long confined chiral nematic polymer inside a spherical enclosure, mimicking condensation of DNA inside a viral capsid. The Landau-de Gennes nematic free energy {\sl Ansatz} appropriate for nematic polymers…
Interference terms between monopole and quadrupole Coulomb form factors that contribute to the cross-section of electron scattering from polarized nuclei are studied within the plane wave Born approximation. By experimentally exploring the…
A micrometer-scale elastic shell immersed in a nematic liquid crystal may be deformed by the host if the cost of deformation is comparable to the cost of elastic deformation of the nematic. Moreover, such inclusions interact and form chains…
A novel phenomenon is discovered that the short-range interaction between strongly nonlocal spatial solitons depends sinusoidally on their phase difference. The two neighbouring solitons at close proximate can be inter-trapped via the…
Nuclei of ordered materials emerging from the isotropic state usually show a shape topologically equivalent to a sphere; the well-known examples are crystals and nematic liquid crystal droplets. In this work, we explore experimentally and…
We use the Landau-de Gennes energy to describe a particle immersed into nematic liquid crystals with a constant applied magnetic field. We derive a limit energy in a regime where both line and point defects are present, showing…
We have studied the properties of biaxial particles interacting via an anisotropic pair potential, involving second rank quadrupolar and third rank octupolar coupling terms, using Monte Carlo simulation. The particles occupy the sites of a…
By molecular modeling we demonstrate that the nematic long-range order discovered in bent-core liquid crystal systems should reveal further spatially homogeneous phases. Two of them are identified as a tetrahedratic nematic ($N_T$) phase…
The implications of soft `patchy' interactions on the orientational disorder-order transition of strongly elongated colloidal rods and flat disks is studied within a simple Onsager-van der Waals density functional theory. The theory…
We carry out Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the effect of molecular shape on liquid-crystal order. In our approach, each model mesogen consists of several soft spheres bonded rigidly together. The arrangement of the spheres may be…
A theoretical model of shape-anisometric particles embedded in a cubic lattice is formulated for binary mixtures combining rod-like, plate-like and spherical particles. The model aims at providing a tool for the prediction and…