Related papers: Structural transitions in sheared electrically sta…
Structural response of crystals to an applied external perturbation is important as a key for understanding microscopic origin of physical properties. Experimental investigation of structural response is a great challenge for modern…
Simulations of the structure and dynamics of fluid films confined to a thickness of a few molecular diameters are described. Confining walls introduce layering and in-plane order in the adjacent fluid. The latter is essential to transfer of…
I discuss the analytic structure of thermodynamic quantities for complex values of thermodynamic variables within Landau theory. In particular, the singularities connected with phase transitions of second order, first order and cross over…
The shear rheology of soft particles systems becomes complex at large density because crowding effects may induce a glass transition for Brownian particles, or a jamming transition for non-Brownian systems. Here we successfully explore the…
Discrete element numerical simulations of unsteady, homogeneous shear flows have been performed by instantly applying a constant shear rate to a random, static, isotropic assembly of identical, soft, frictional spheres at either zero or…
Hard sphere colloidal particles are a basic model system for general research into phase behavior, ordering and out-equilibrium glass transitions. Experimentally it has been shown that oscillatory shearing of a monodisperse hard sphere…
We investigate in the framework of Landau theory the distortion of the strain fields at the interface of two dissimilar ferroelastic oxides that undergo a structural cubic-to-tetragonal phase transition. Simple analytical solutions are…
We propose Landau phenomenology for describing the phase transition from the conventional nematic into the conical helical orientationally non-uniform structure recently identified in liquid crystals formed by "banana"-shaped molecules. The…
Cholesteric liquid crystals exhibit great morphological richness of static metastable states. Understanding the transitions between such states is key for the development of switchable devices. We show, using a quasi-one-dimensional model,…
Confining a colloidal crystal within a long narrow channel produced by two parallel walls can be used to impose a meso-scale superstructure of a predominantly mechanical elastic character [Chui et al., EPL 2008, 83, 58004]. When the crystal…
The boundary conditions, customarily used in the Landau-type approach to ferroelectric thin films and nanostructures, have to be modified to take into account that a surface of a ferroelectric (FE) is a defect of a ``field'' type. The…
Compact stars above a critical stellar mass develop large scalar fields in some scalar-tensor theories. This scenario, called spontaneous scalarization, has been an intense topic of study since it passes weak-field gravity tests naturally…
Recent advances in experimental and computational techniques have allowed for an accurate description of the adsorption of ionic liquids on metallic electrodes. It is now well established that they adopt a multi-layered structure, and that…
The study of critical phenomena and phase transitions is an important part of modern condensed matter physics. In this regard, the phenomenological Landau theory has been extraordinarily useful. Hereby we present an alternative theoretical…
Abrupt transition to turbulence may occur in pipe and channel flows at moderate flow rates, an unexpected event according to linear stability theory, and has been an open problem in fluid dynamics for more than a century. Extensive…
The stress-induced yielding scenario of colloidal gels is investigated under rough boundary conditions by means of rheometry coupled to local velocity measurements. Under an applied shear stress, the fluidization of gels made of attractive…
Exploring structural order in disordered systems including liquids and glasses is an intriguing but challenging issue in condensed matter physics. Here we construct a new parameter based on the angular distribution function of particles and…
A theory for the non-local stress in liquids captures the crossover from viscous to elastic correlations upon supercooling. It explains the emergence of long-ranged stress fields in glass which originate from the coupling of shear stress to…
In nematic liquid crystals (NLCs), topological defects of a chiral origin play a role in phase transitions and lead to phase configurations of nontrivial topology, like those in neutron stars and helium in the A-phase. In the…
Phase transitions in random systems are smeared if individual spatial regions can order independently of the bulk system. In this paper, we study such smeared phase transitions (both classical and quantum) in substitutional alloys…