Related papers: Modeling Smectic Layers in Confined Geometries: Or…
We present a new variational model for computing the electronic first-order density matrix of a crystalline material in presence of a local defect. A natural way to obtain variational discretizations of this model is to expand the…
Modeling liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) at the molecular level is crucial for the predictable design of energy-conversion and stimuli-responsive materials. Here, we develop a self-consistent field theory for LCEs which captures the…
Molecular design requires systematic and broadly applicable methods to extract structure-property relationships. The focus of this study is on learning thermodynamic properties from molecular-liquid simulations. The methodology relies on an…
The discovery of fluid states of matter with spontaneous bulk polar order is appreciated as a major discovery in the fields of soft matter and liquid crystals. Typically, this manifests as polar order superimposed atop conventional phase…
We study a collection of stability conditions (in the sense of Schmitt) for complexes of sheaves over a smooth complex projective variety indexed by a positive rational parameter. We show that the Harder-Narasimhan filtration of a complex…
Recent experiments on vesicles formed from block copolymers with liquid-crystalline side-chains reveal a rich variety of vesicle morphologies. The additional internal order ("structure") developed by these self-assembled block copolymer…
We explore the nematic ordering of the rod-like liquid crystals 5CB and 6CB, embedded into parallel-aligned nanochannels in mesoporous silicon and silica membranes as a function of mean channel radius (4.7<=R <=8.3 nm), and thus geometrical…
We introduce an order parameter for symmetry-protected phases in one dimension which allows to directly identify those phases. The order parameter consists of string-like operators and swaps, but differs from conventional string order…
We suggest two metrics for assessing the quality of atomistic configurations of disordered materials, both of which are based on quantifying the orientational distribution of neighbours around each atom in the configuration. The first…
We introduce the theoretical framework we use to study the bewildering variety of phases in condensed--matter physics. We emphasize the importance of the breaking of symmetries, and develop the idea of an order parameter through several…
To enlighten the nature of the order-disorder and order-order transitions in block copolymer melts confined in narrow capillaries we analyze peculiarities of the conventional Landau weak crystallization theory of systems confined to…
The short-range order which remains when the isotropic to smectic-A transition is perturbed by a gel of silica nanoparticles (aerosils) has been studied using high-resolution synchrotron x-ray diffraction. The gels have been created…
We study the organization of topological defects in a system of nematogens confined to the two-dimensional sphere (S^2). We first perform Monte Carlo simulations of a fluid system of hard rods (spherocylinders) living in the tangent plane…
Many systems in nature and the synthetic world involve ordered arrangements of units on two-dimensional surfaces. We review here the fundamental role payed by both the topology of the underlying surface and its detailed curvature. Topology…
Liquid crystals are assemblies of rod-like molecules which self-organize to form mesophases, in-between ordinary liquids and anisotropic crystals. At each point, the molecules collectively orient themselves along a privileged direction,…
Both uniaxial and biaxial nematic liquid crystals are defined by orientational ordering of their building blocks. While uniaxial nematics only orient the long molecular axis, biaxial order implies local order along three axes. As the…
Context. Current constraints on distributed matter in the innermost Galactic Centre (such as a cluster of faint stars and stellar remnants, Dark Matter or a combination thereof) based on the orbital dynamics of the visible stars closest to…
Models which allow an explicit application to structurally modulated substances are reviewed within the frame of a symmetry-based approach starting from discrete lattice theory. Focus is set on models formulated in terms of local variables…
Given recipe of qualitative, kinetic modelling by geometric methods of three-dimensional dendritic crystals. Characteristic features of the perturbations appearing on the surface of a spherical body, leading to different scenarios of the…
A comprehensive modeling and simulation study of the first-order isotropic/smectic-A transition is presented and applied to phase diagram computation and two-dimensional spherulite growth. An approach based on nonlinear optimization, that…