Related papers: Structural transitions in sheared electrically sta…
Cation disorder is an important design criterion for technologically relevant transition-metal (TM) oxides, such as radiation-tolerant ceramics and Li-ion battery electrodes. In this letter, we use a combination of first-principles…
A theory for surface transitions in the presence of a disordered pinning potential is presented. Arbitrary disorder correlations are treated in the framework of a dynamical functional renormalization group. The roughening transition, where…
The commonly accepted description of transition to turbulence in shear flows requires the presence of an external source of disturbances that get amplified by an essentially linear mechanism up to the point where breakdown to turbulence…
We study colloidal ordering and disordering on two-dimensional periodic substrates where the number of colloids per substrate minima is two or three. The colloids form dimer or trimer states with orientational ordering, referred to as…
Ferroelectrics show a phase transition to a paraelectric phase at a well-defined transition temperature. Introducing disorder makes this transition diffuse, and the system becomes a relaxor. Since the degree of (dis-)order is usually…
We show that development of polar order may spontaneously destroy the lamellar structure of a liquid crystal. This results in an unusual sequence of phases with the ferroelectric nematic phase appearing below a non-polar smectic phase. The…
Phase transitions in disordered systems can be smeared if rare spatial regions develop true static order while the bulk system is in the disordered phase. Here, we study the effects of spatial disorder correlations on such smeared phase…
Metastable phases may be spontaneously formed from other metastable phases through nucleation. Here we demonstrate the spontaneous formation of a metastable phase from an unstable equilibrium by spinodal decomposition, which leads to a…
Amorphous solids relax via slow molecular rearrangement induced by thermal fluctuations or applied stress. Although microscopic structural signatures predicting these structural relaxations have long been sought, a physically motivated…
The electronic band structure of crystals is generally influenced by the periodic arrangement of their constituent atoms. Specifically, the emerging two-dimensional (2D) layered structures have shown different band structures with respect…
What characterises a solid is its way to respond to external stresses. Ordered solids, such crystals, display an elastic regime followed by a plastic one, both well understood microscopically in terms of lattice distortion and dislocations.…
As one increases the concentration of a colloidal suspension, the system exhibits a dramatic increase in viscosity. Structurally, the system resembles a liquid, yet motions within the suspension are slow enough that it can be considered…
When exposed to strong shearing, the particles in a crystal will rearrange and ultimately, the crystal will break by forming large nonaffine defects. Even for the initial stage of this process, only little effort has been devoted to the…
Recently, Van der Kooij and co-workers recognised three distinct, transient regimes in the dynamics of electrically-deforming liquid crystal networks [Van der Kooij et al., Nat. Commun. 10, 1 (2019)]. Based on a Landau-theoretical…
A statistical theory of cholesteric liquid crystals composed of short rigid biaxial molecules is presented. It is derived in the thermodynamic limit at a small density and a small twist. The uniaxial (biaxial) cholesteric phase is regarded…
Randomly crosslinked macromolecules undergo a liquid-to-amorphous solid phase transition at a critical crosslink concentration. This transition has two main signatures: the random localization of a fraction of the monomers and the emergence…
Mechanically induced crystallographic phase transformation that reflects dynamic stress responses of intrinsically stochastic nature is a pertinent yet much less well-understood phenomenon. We focus on understanding the physical…
Cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) have a characteristic length scale given by the pitch of the twisted stacking of their constituent rod-like molecules. Under homeotropic anchoring conditions where the molecules prefer to orient…
Cholesteric Liquid Crystals (CLCs), subject to externally applied magnetic fields and confined between two parallel planar surfaces with strong homeotropic anchoring conditions, are found to undergo transitions to different types of…
The main objective of this article is to derive a mathematical theory associated with the nonlinear stability and dynamic transitions of the basic shear flows associated with baroclinic instability, which plays a fundamental role in the…