Related papers: Stretchable liquid crystal blue phase gels
Physical properties of composite materials can be pre-engineered by controlling their structure and composition at the mesoscale. Yet, approaches for achieving this are limited and rarely scalable. We introduce a new breed of self-assembled…
Plasticized poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) is a jelly-like soft dielectric material that attracted substantial interest recently as a new type of electro-active polymers. Under electric fields of several hundred Volt/mm, PVC gels undergo large…
As a nontrivial solid state of matter, the glassy-crystal state embraces physical features of both crystalline and amorphous solids, where a long-range ordered periodic structure formed by the mass centers of constituent molecules…
Photonic crystals and metamaterials have emerged as two classes of tailorable materials that enable precise control of light. Plasmonic crystals, which can be thought of as photonic crystals fabricated from plasmonic materials, Bragg…
Inverted nonlinear photonic crystals are the crystals featuring competition between linear and nonlinear lattices, with minima of the linear potential coinciding with maxima of the nonlinear pseudopotential, and vice versa. Traditional…
We report a thorough characterization of the dielectric relaxation behavior and the ionic conductivity in the plastic-crystalline mixture of 60% succinonitrile and 40% glutaronitrile. The plastic phase can be easily supercooled and the…
Programmable and reconfigurable optics hold significant potential for transforming a broad spectrum of applications, spanning space explorations to biomedical imaging, gas sensing, and optical cloaking. The ability to adjust the optical…
Extensibility is beyond the paradigm of classical soft glassy materials, and more broadly, yield-stress fluids. Recently, model yield-stress fluids with significant extensibility have been designed by adding polymeric phases to classically…
We describe some recent results concerning the statistical properties of a self-interacting polymer stretched by an external force. We concentrate mainly on the cases of purely attractive or purely repulsive self-interactions, but our…
Versatile manipulation of nano- and microobjects underlies the optomechanics and a variety of its applications in biology, medicine, and lab-on-a-chip platforms. For flexible tailoring optical forces, as well as for extraordinary…
We demonstrate a novel artificial optical material, a photonic hyper-crystal, which combines the most interesting features of hyperbolic metamaterials and photonic crystals. Similar to hyperbolic metamaterials, photonic hyper-crystals…
Metallic glasses are formed by splat-cooling; this ensures that atomic motions are arrested before the latent heat of solidification can be extracted. Glass is defined as a higher disorder metastable state with arrested kinetics. Arrested…
We use full nematohydrodynamic simulations to study the statics and dynamics of monolayers of cholesteric liquid crystals. Using chirality and temperature as control parameters we show that we can recover the two-dimensional blue phases…
Due to the intertwining between electronic nematic and elastic degrees of freedom, lattice defects and structural inhomogeneities commonly found in crystals can have a significant impact on the electronic properties of nematic materials.…
Periodically structured materials can sustain both optical and mechanical excitations which are tailored by the geometry. Here we analyze the properties of dispersively coupled planar photonic and phononic crystals: optomechanical crystals.…
Lattice Boltzmann simulations have become a method of choice to solve the hydrodynamic equations of motion of a number of complex fluids. Here we review some recent applications of lattice Boltzmann to study the hydrodynamics of liquid…
Physico-mechanical properties of polymers in solid state, in particular conditions of their structural transformations, are substantially defined by existence and mobility of elementary nonlinear excitations. The localized oscillatory…
Disclinations lines play a key role in many physical processes, from the fracture of materials to the formation of the early universe. Achieving versatile control over disclinations is key to developing novel electro-optical devices,…
Semiflexible polymers in concentrated lyotropic solution are studied within a bead-spring model by molecular dynamics simulations, focusing on the emergence of a smectic A phase and its properties. We systematically vary the density of the…
Liquid crystals are the prototype of the so-called soft condensed matter. In simple terms they are "structured liquids" that historically have received a lot of interest because they help to generate new concepts and knowledge in Physics,…