Related papers: Stable nematic droplets with handles
Chirality is a recurrent theme in the study of biological systems, in which active processes are driven by the internal conversion of chemical energy into work. Bacterial flagella, acto-myosin filaments and microtubule bundles are active…
We analyze the stability and dynamics of toroidal liquid droplets. In addition to the Rayleigh instabilities akin to those of a cylindrical droplet there is a shrinking instability that is unique to the topology of the torus and dominates…
Studies of sessile droplets and fluid bridges of a ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal in externally applied electric fields are presented. It is found that above a threshold, the interface of the fluid with air undergoes a fingering…
Systems with holes, such as colloidal handlebodies and toroidal droplets, have been studied in the nematic liquid crystal (NLC) 4-cyano-4'-pentylbiphenyl (5CB): both point and ring topological defects can occur within each hole and around…
We study the rolling and sliding motion of droplets on a corrugated substrate by Molecular Dynamics simulations. Droplets are driven by an external body force (gravity) and we investigate the velocity profile and dissipation mechanisms in…
The nonlinear elastic properties of nematic liquid crystals have acquired new interest with the recent experimental observation of bulk modulated nematic phases which are composed by achiral molecules. We extend the Oseen-Zocher-Frank's…
Instabilities in thin elastic sheets, such as wrinkles, are of broad interest both from a fundamental viewpoint and also because of their potential for engineering applications. Nematic liquid crystal elastomers offer a new form of control…
Aqueous dispersions of exfoliated, bile-salt stabilized single-wall carbon nanotubes exhibit a first order transition to a nematic liquid-crystalline phase. The nematic phase presents itself in the form of micron-sized nematic droplets also…
Instabilities of fluid-fluid interfaces are ubiquitous in passive soft matter. Adding activity to the interface or either fluid can dramatically change the stability of the interface. Using experiment and theory, we investigate the…
Being a major limiting factor for the efficiency of various technologies, such as Enhanced Oil Recovery, the viscous fingering (or Saffman--Taylor) instability has been extensively studied, especially for simple Newtonian fluids. Here, we…
We study droplets of chromonic liquid crystals squeezed between parallel plates inducing degenerate tangential anchoring on the nematic director. In the coexistence regime, where droplets in the nematic phase are at equilibrium with the…
We analyze stability of the planar orientational structure in a nematic liquid crystal (NLC) cell with planar anchoring conditions at both substrates. Specifically, we study the instabilities of the ground state caused by surface elasticity…
Inverse nematic emulsions in which surfactant-coated water droplets are dispersed in a nematic host fluid have distinctive properties that set them apart from dispersions of two isotropic fluids or of nematic droplets in an isotropic fluid.…
Using computer simulations we investigate the microscopic structure of the singular director field within a nematic droplet. As a theoretical model for nematic liquid crystals we take hard spherocylinders. To induce an overall topological…
The impact dynamics of viscoelastic droplets on solid surfaces play a critical role in numerous applications, including inkjet printing, spray coating, and microfluidics, where precise control of spreading, retraction, and rebound is…
We show that energy dissipation partition between a liquid and a solid controls the shape and stability of droplets sliding on viscoelastic gels. When both phases dissipate energy equally, droplet dynamics is similar to that on rigid…
We study spreading dynamics of nematic liquid crystal droplets within the framework of the long-wave approximation. A fourth order nonlinear parabolic partial differential equation governing the free surface evolution is derived. The…
We numerically investigate the rheological response of a non-coalescing multiple emulsion under a symmetric shear flow. We find that the dynamics significantly depends on the magnitude of the shear rate and on the number of the encapsulated…
Recent theoretical research has developed a general framework to understand director deformations and modulated phases in nematic liquid crystals. In this framework, there are four fundamental director deformation modes: twist, bend, splay,…
We consider the dynamics of active nematics droplets on flat surfaces, based on the continuum hydrodynamic theory. We investigate a wide range of dynamical regimes as a function of the activity and droplet size on surfaces characterized by…