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Self-positioned nanomembranes such as rolled-up tubes and wrinkled thin films have been potential systems for a variety of applications and basic studies on elastic properties of nanometer-thick systems. Although there is a clear driving…
Theoretical analyses and experiments have been carried out to investigate fracture behavior of glassy polymers. Our birefringence measurements quantify the local stress buildup at cut tip during different stages of drawing. Based on…
This article analyzes modulated phases in liquid crystals, from the long-established cholesteric and blue phases to the recently discovered twist-bend, splay-bend, and splay nematic phases, as well as the twist-grain-boundary (TGB) and…
Colloids are abundant in nature, science and technology, with examples ranging from milk to quantum dots and the "colloidal atom" paradigm. Similarly, liquid crystal ordering is important in contexts ranging from biological membranes to…
Recent step strain experiments in well-entangled polymeric liquids demonstrated a bulk fracture-like phenomenon. We have studied this instability using a modern version of the Doi-Edwards theory for entangled polymers, and we find close…
Smectic liquid crystals are materials formed by stacking deformable, fluid layers. Though smectics prefer to have flat, uniformly-spaced layers, boundary conditions can impose curvature on the layers. Since the layer spacing and curvature…
Nonlinear optical propagation in cholesteric liquid crystals (CLC) with a spatially periodic helical molecular structure is studied experimentally and modeled numerically. This periodic structure can be seen as a Bragg grating with a…
Amongst the various fascinating types of material behavior featured by magnetic gels and elastomers are magnetostrictive effects. That is, deformations in shape or changes in volume are induced from outside by external magnetic fields.…
A thermodynamically related model is developed for describing elastic rubber-like behavior of amorphous and crystallizing polymers and demonstrated on example of simple extension. Both the “entropic” and “energetic”…
Photonic hyper-crystals combine the most interesting features of hyperbolic metamaterials and photonic crystals. Since the dispersion law of extraordinary photons in hyperbolic metamaterials does not exhibit the usual diffraction limit,…
The sliding columnar phase is a new liquid-crystalline phase of matter composed of two-dimensional smectic lattices stacked one on top of the other. This phase is characterized by strong orientational but weak positional correlations…
The crystal growth of isotactic polystyrene (it-PS) is investigated in very thin, 11 nm thick films. The it-PS crystals grown in the thin films show quite different morphology from that in the bulk. With decreasing crystallization…
Liquid crystals have attracted enormous interest because of the variety of their phases and richness of their application. The interplay of general physical symmetries and specific molecular features generates a myriad of different…
Nematic polymeric networks are (heat and light) activable materials, which combine the features of rubber and nematic liquid crystals. When only the stretching energy of a thin sheet of nematic polymeric network is minimized, the intrinsic…
Plasmonics has been attracting considerable interest as it allows localization of light at nanoscale dimensions. A breakthrough in integrated nanophotonics can be obtained by fabricating plasmonic functional materials. Such systems may show…
Elastomers are artificial polymeric materials created for industrial and commercial applications. Depending on their purpose, they are performing in different species and structure modifications. Our studies focus on the systems of…
Finding new ionic conductors that enable significant advancements in the development of energy-storage devices is a challenging goal of current material science. Aside of material classes as ionic liquids or amorphous ion conductors, the…
Our lives are surrounded by a rich assortment of disordered materials. In particular, glasses are well known as dense, amorphous materials, whereas gels exist in low-density, disordered states. Recent progress has provided a significant…
Flexible mechanical metamaterials are compliant structures engineered to achieve unique properties via the large deformation of their components. While their static character has been studied extensively, the study of their dynamic…
Liquid crystal elastomers are rubbers with liquid crystal order. They contract along their nematic director when heated or illuminated. The shape changes are large and occur in a relatively narrow temperature interval, or at low…