Related papers: Breaking the Rules for Topological Defects: Smecti…
The formation and dynamics of a wide variety of binary two-dimensional ordered structures and superlattices are investigated through a phase field crystal model with sublattice ordering. Various types of binary ordered phases, the phase…
Solid materials possess both long-range order and some degree of disorder are critical for understanding the nature of crystal and glassy state, but how to controllable introduce specific type of disorder into a crystalline material is a…
Curved particles have been shown to stabilize a range of states with unique order in dense suspensions of colloidal bent core liquid crystals. The shape of the colloidal rods encourages the formation of curved director fields. However,…
Smectic liquid crystals are charcterized by layers that have a preferred uniform spacing and vanishing curvature in their ground state. Dislocations in the smectics play an important role in phase nucleation, layer reorientation, and…
Crystals are a state of matter characterised by periodic order. Yet crystalline materials can harbour disorder in many guises, such as non-repeating variations in composition, atom displacements, bonding arrangements, molecular…
An interface description and numerical simulations of model A kinetics are used for the first time to investigate the intra-surface kinetics of phase ordering on corrugated surfaces. Geometrical dynamical equations are derived for the…
We study, analytically and theoretically, defects in a nematically-ordered surface that couple to the extrinsic geometry of a surface. Though the intrinsic geometry tends to confine topological defects to regions of large Gaussian…
We examine the statics and dynamics of vortices in the presence of a periodic quasi-one dimensional substrate, focusing on the limit where the vortex lattice constant is smaller than the substrate lattice period. As a function of the…
The best-understood crystal ordering transition is that of two-dimensional freezing, which proceeds by the rapid eradication of lattice defects as the temperature is lowered below a critical threshold. But crystals that assemble on closed…
The order parameter of the smectic liquid crystal phase is the same as that of a superfluid or superconductor, namely a complex scalar field. We show that the essential difference in boundary conditions between these systems leads to a…
Liquid crystals can self-organize into a layered smectic phase. While the smectic layers are typically straight forming a lamellar pattern in bulk, external confinement may drastically distort the layers due to the boundary conditions…
When two molecular species with mutual affinity are mixed together, various self-assembled phases can arise at low temperature, depending on the shape of like and unlike interactions. Among them, stripes -- where layers of one type are…
The homotopy theory of topological defects in ordered media fails to completely characterize systems with broken translational symmetry. We argue that the problem can be understood in terms of the lack of rotational Goldstone modes in such…
Defects are a ubiquitous feature of ordered media. They have certain universal features, independent of the underlying physical system, reflecting their topological origins. While the topological properties of defects are robust, they…
A theoretical study of toroidal membranes with various degrees of intrinsic orientational order is presented at mean-field level. The study uses a simple Ginzburg-Landau style free energy functional, which gives rise to a rich variety of…
The complexity of condensed matter arises from emergent behaviors that cannot be understood by analyzing individual constituents in isolation. While traditional condensed-matter approaches-developed primarily for ideal crystalline…
We study thin self-assembled columns constrained to lie on a curved, rigid substrate. The curvature presents no local obstruction to equally spaced columns in contrast to curved crystals for which the crystalline bonds are frustrated.…
Surface-induced liquid crystalline phase transitions evoke fundamental interest and can provide deeper insight into the nature of low-dimensional phase transitions. Board-like conjugated polymers are particularly interesting because they…
This review introduces the elasticity theory of two-dimensional crystals and nematic liquid crystals on curved surfaces, the energetics of topological defects (disclinations, dislocations and pleats) in these ordered phases, and the…
We identify problems with the standard complex order parameter formalism for smectic-A (SmA) liquid crystals, and discuss possible alternative descriptions of smectic order. In particular, we suggest an approach based on the real smectic…