Related papers: Multiple ordering transitions in a chiral liquid
The mode-coupling theory of the glass transition treats the dynamics of supercooled liquids in terms of two-point density correlation functions. Here we consider a generalized, hierarchical formulation of schematic mode-coupling equations…
We report the discovery of a mixed orientational structure in the quasi-one-dimensional fluid of hard non-spherical bodies with the exact calculation of the thermodynamic and structural quantities using the transfer operator method. The…
The onset of structural arrest and glass formation in a concentrated suspension of silica nanoparticles in a water-lutidine binary mixture near its consolute point is studied by exploiting the near-critical fluid degrees of freedom to…
Despite long-standing theoretical interest, the chiral spin liquid, a topologically ordered phase, has yet to be observed experimentally. Here we surprisingly find its emergence in an experimentally realized dipolar $\text{XY}$ model when…
Liquid crystals in two dimensions do not support long-ranged nematic order, but a quasi-nematic phase where the orientational correlations decay algebraically is possible. The transition from the isotropic to the quasi-nematic phase can be…
We present the results of molecular dynamics simulations of the Gay-Berne model of liquid crystals, supercooled from the nematic phase. We find a glass transition to a metastable phase with nematic order and frozen translational and…
The observation of chirality is ubiquitous in nature. Contrary to intuition, the population of opposite chiralities is surprisingly asymmetric at fundamental levels. Examples range from parity violation in the subatomic weak force to the…
It is commonly believed that the transition line separating a liquid and a solid cannot be interrupted by a critical point. This opinion is based on the traditional symmetry argument that an isotropic liquid cannot be continuously…
Phase separation in a complex fluid with lamellar order has been studied in the case of cold thermal fronts propagating diffusively from external walls. The velocity hydrodynamic modes are taken into account by coupling the…
Glass-forming liquids have been extensively studied in recent decades, but there is still no theory that fully describes these systems, and the diversity of treatments is in itself a barrier to understanding. Here we introduce a new simple…
We introduce a model to describe columnar phases of chiral discotic liquid phases in which the normals to disc-like molecules are constrained to lie parallel to columnar axes. The model includes separate chiral interactions favoring,…
We study numerically the crystallization of a hard-sphere mixture with 8\% polydispersity. Although often used as a model glass former, for small system sizes we observe crystallization in molecular dynamics simulations. This opens the…
Cholesteric Liquid Crystals (CLCs), subject to externally applied magnetic fields and confined between two parallel planar surfaces with strong homeotropic anchoring conditions, are found to undergo transitions to different types of…
We study the effect of confinement on glassy liquids using Random First Order Transition theory as framework. We show that the characteristic length-scale above which confinement effects become negligible is related to the point-to-set…
Nanostructured ferroelectrics display exotic multidomain configurations resulting from the electrostatic and elastic boundary conditions they are subject to. While the ferroelectric domains appear frozen in experimental images, atomistic…
Due to elastic anisotropy, two-dimensional patterning of substrates can promote weak azimuthal alignment of adjacent nematic liquid crystals. Here, we consider how such alignment can be achieved using a periodic square lattice of circular…
We consider cold polar molecules confined in a helical optical lattice similar to those used in holographic microfabrication. An external electric field polarizes molecules along the axis of the helix. The large-distance inter-molecular…
It is well-known that spontaneous symmetry breaking in one spatial dimension is thermodynamically forbidden at finite energy density. Here we show that mirror-symmetric disorder in an interacting quantum system can invert this paradigm,…
We discuss some interesting physical features stemming from our previous analytical study of a simple model of a fluid with dipolar-like interactions of very short range in addition to the usual isotropic Baxter potential for adhesive…
The study of the O(N) model at nonzero temperature is presented applying the auxiliary field method, which allows to obtain a continuous transformation between the linear and the nonlinear version of the model. In case of explicitly broken…