Related papers: Stable nematic droplets with handles
Anisotropic fluids appear in a diverse array of systems, from liquid-crystal displays to bacterial swarms, and are characterized by orientational order. Large colloidal particles immersed in such environments disturb the medium's…
We consider a continuum model of active viscoelastic matter, whereby an active nematic liquid-crystal is coupled to a minimal model of polymer dynamics with a viscoelastic relaxation time $\tau_C$. To explore the resulting interplay between…
In recent decades novel solid substrates have been designed which change their wettability in response to light or an electrostatic field. Here, we investigate a droplet on substrates with oscillating uniform wettability by varying minimium…
The hydrodynamic stresses created by active particles can destabilise orientational order present in the system. This is manifested, for example, by the appearance of a bend instability in active nematics or in quasi-2-dimensional living…
We explore a novel strategy of patterning nematic elastomers that does not require inscribing the texture directly. It is based on varying the dopant concentration that, beside shifting the phase transition point, affects the nematic…
Stability is an important and fruitful avenue of research for liquid crystal elastomers. At constant temperature, upon stretching, the homogeneous state of a nematic body becomes unstable, and alternating shear stripes develop at very low…
Soft materials are ubiquitous in technological applications that require deformability, for instance, in flexible, water-repellent coatings. However, the wetting properties of pre-strained soft materials are only beginning to be explored.…
We develop a model for the thermodynamics and evaporation dynamics of aerosol droplets of a liquid such as water, surrounded by the gas. When the temperature and the chemical potential (or equivalently the humidity) are such that the vapour…
Flows with deformable interfaces are commonly controlled by applying an external field or modifying the boundaries that interact with the fluid, but realizing such solutions can be demanding or impractical in various scenarios. Here, we…
Understanding and controlling the director field configuration, shape, and orientation in nematic and cholesteric liquid crystals is of fundamental importance in several branches of science. Liquid crystalline droplets, also known as…
Nematic superconductors possess unconventional superconducting order parameters that spontaneously break rotational symmetry of the underlying crystal. In this work we propose a mechanism for nematic superconductivity stabilized by strong…
We consider nematic liquid crystals in a bounded, convex polyhedron described by a director field n(r) subject to tangent boundary conditions. We derive lower bounds for the one-constant elastic energy in terms of topological invariants.…
Hydrodynamic problems with stagnation points are of particular importance in fluid mechanics as they allow study and investigation of elongational flows. In this article, the uniaxial elongational flow appearing at the surface of a…
We study the homogeneous and the spatially periodic instabilities in a nematic liquid crystal layer subjected to steady plane {\em Couette} or {\em Poiseuille} flow. The initial director orientation is perpendicular to the flow plane. Weak…
Topological defects are a ubiquitous phenomenon in diverse physical systems. In nematic liquid crystals (LCs), they are dynamic, physicochemically distinct, sensitive to stimuli, and are thereby promising for a range of applications.…
Yield-stress materials, which require a sufficiently large forcing to flow, are currently ill-understood theoretically. To gain insight into their yielding transition, here we study numerically the rheology of a suspension of deformable…
We investigate the mechanical behavior of particle-stabilized droplets using micropipette aspiration. We observe that droplets stabilized with amphiphilic dumbbell-shaped particles exhibit a two-stage response to increasing suction…
We investigate the switching dynamics of multistable nematic liquid crystal devices. In particular we identify a remarkably simple 2-dimensional (2D) device which exploits hybrid alignment at the surfaces to yield a bistable response. We…
Recent numerical simulations of lid-driven cavity flow of a nematic liquid crystal have found dynamical behavior where topological defects rotate about the center of the fluid vortex induced by the lid motion. By considering a simpler…
We investigate experimentally and numerically the defect configurations emerging when a cholesteric liquid crystal is confined to a spherical shell. We uncover a rich scenario of defect configurations, some of them non-existent in nematic…