Related papers: Ring around the colloid
Flagellated microswimmers B. Subtilis dispersed in a nematic phase of a lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal form a living liquid crystal (LLC). The combination of the passive and active components allows us to analyze how the active…
We study the aggregation phenomenon in lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals as the molecular concentration changes and condensing agents are added into the system. Using properties of the critical points of the Oseen-Frank energy of a…
Toroidal nematics are nematic liquid crystals confined within a circular torus and subject to planar degenerate anchoring on the boundary of the torus. They may be droplets floating in an isotropic environment or cavities carved out of a…
We give a brief introduction to a divergence penalized Landau-de Gennes functional as a toy model for the study of nematic liquid crystal with colloid inclusion, in the case of unequal elastic constants. We assume that the nematic occupies…
We propose the use of topographic modulation of surfaces to select and localize particles in nematic colloids. By considering convex and concave deformations of one of the confining surfaces we show that the colloid-flat surface repulsion…
In recent years, experimental and theoretical investigations have shown that anisotropic colloids can self-organise into ordered porous monolayers, where the interplay of localised bonding sites, so called patches, with the particle's shape…
Block copolymer are ideal matrices to control the localisation of colloids. Furthermore, anisotropic nanoparticles such as Janus nanoparticles possess an additional orientational degree of freedom that can play a crucial role in the…
We present Monte Carlo simulations of liquid-crystalline material confined to a nanoscopic slit-pore. The simulations are carried out under isothermal conditions in a specialized isostress ensemble in which N fluid molecules are exposed to…
We explore the structure of nuclei and topological defects in the first-order phase transition between the nematic (N) and isotropic (I) phases in lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals (LCLCs). The LCLCs are formed by self-assembled molecular…
In 1T-TaS2, the nearly-commensurate charge density wave (NC-CDW) exhibits emergent chirality, a property of interest for technological applications such as memory. We study the relationship between chirality and topological defects using…
We present experiments where anisometric colloidal microparticles dispersed in a nematic liquid crystal cell with homeotropic anchoring conditions are dynamically assembled by means of liquid-crystal-enabled electrophoresis (LCEEP) using an…
Liquid crystals inevitably possess topological defect excitations generated through boundary conditions, applied fields or in quenches to the ordered phase. In equilibrium pairs of defects coarsen and annihilate as the uniform ground state…
Topological defects that form on surfaces of ordered media, dubbed boojums, are ubiquitous in superfluids, liquid crystals (LCs), Langmuir monolayers, and Bose-Einstein condensates. They determine supercurrents in superfluids, impinge on…
We have recently investigated the phase behaviour of model colloidal dumbbells constituted by two identical tangent hard spheres, with the first one being surrounded by an attractive square-well interaction (Janus dumbbells, Muna\`o G et al…
Lyotropic liquid crystals can display rich phase behaviour and self-organisation, yet the physical principles underlying their self-assembly into large scale patterns remains understudied. Here, we combine theory, simulations and…
We theoretically investigate into the effects of the incidence angles in light transmission of cholesteric liquid crystal two-layer sandwich structures with twist defects created by rotation of the one layer about the helical axis.The…
The phase behavior of a single type of colloid C suspended in near-critical solvents is known to be very rich. Motivated in part by recent experiments we consider a mixture of two colloidal types C1 and C2 in a binary solvent close to its…
Laser cooled and trapped ions can crystallize and feature discrete solitons, that are nonlinear, topologically-protected configurations of the Coulomb crystal. Such solitons, as their continuum counterparts, can move within the crystal,…
In a nematic gel, the appearance of nematic order is accompanied by a spontaneous elongation of the gel parallel to the nematic director. If such a gel is made chiral, it has a tendency to form a cholesteric helical texture, in which local…
Crystal defects can highlight interesting quantum features by coupling to the low-energy Hamiltonian $H$. Here we show that independently of this $H$ coupling, topological crystalline defects can generate new features by directly modifying…