Related papers: Fluctuation-induced interactions in nematics with …
We study colloidal particles in a nematic-liquid-crystal-filled microfluidic channel and show how elastic interactions between the particle and the channel wall lead to different particle dynamics compared with conventional microfluidics.…
Kinetic and hydrodynamic theories are widely employed for describing the collective behaviour of active matter systems. At the fluctuating level, these have been obtained from explicit coarse-graining procedures in the limit where each…
We study cooperative phenomena in the fluctuation-induced forces between a surface and a system of neutral two-level quantum emitters prepared in a coherent collective state, showing that the total Casimir-Polder force on the emitters can…
The confining effect of a spherical substrate inducing anchoring (normal to the surface) of rod-like liquid crystal molecules contained in a thin film spread over it has been investigated with regard to possible changes in the nature of the…
Activity in nematics drives interfacial flows that lead to preferential alignment that is tangential or planar for extensile systems (pushers) and perpendicular or homeotropic for contractile ones (pullers). This alignment is known as…
Basing our arguments on the theory of active liquid crystals, we demonstrate both analytically and numerically, that the activity can induce an effective free energy which enhances ordering in extensile systems of active rods and in…
We perform a comprehensive study of noise-induced effects in a stochastic model of reaction-diffusion type, describing nano-structured thin films growth at condensation. We introduce an external flux of adsorbate between neighbour…
The kinetic processes in nanoparticle-based catalysis are dominated by large fluctuations and spatiotemporal heterogeneities, in particular for diffusion-influenced reactions which are far from equilibrium. Here, we report results from…
The sputter deposition of alternating layers of Ni(V) and Al forms a reactive multilayer known to undergo self-propagating formation reactions when ignited. The sequential deposition process leads to nm-scale premixing of reactants at each…
Critical fluctuations of some order parameter describing a fluid generates long-range forces between boundaries. Here, we discuss fluctuation-induced forces associated to a disordered Landau-Ginzburg model defined in a $d$-dimensional slab…
Monte Carlo simulation, experiment and continuum theory are used to examine the anchoring exhibited by a nematic liquid crystal at a patterned substrate comprising a periodic array of rectangles that, respectively, promote vertical and…
Recent experiments have measured the critical Casimir force acting on a colloid immersed in a binary liquid mixture near its continuous demixing phase transition and exposed to a chemically structured substrate. Motivated by these…
The properties of fluctuation induced interactions like van der Waals and Casimir-Lifshitz forces are of interest in a plethora of fields ranging from biophysics to nanotechnology. Here we describe a general approach to compute these…
The possibility is investigated that competition between fluctuations at different symmetry-related ordering wave vectors may affect the quantum phase transition between a fermi liquid and a longitudinal spin density wave state, in…
Long-range thermal fluctuations appear in fluids in nonequilibrium states leading to fluctuation-induced Casimir-like forces. Two distinct mechanisms have been identified for the origin of the long-range nonequilibrium fluctuations in…
One of the defining features of active nematics is that above a critical activity the quiescent state becomes unstable to a distorted, flowing one. We show that spatial variations in activity can fundamentally change the nature of this…
We develop a discretized theory of thermal Casimir interactions to numerically calculate the interactions between fluctuating dielectrics. From a constrained partition function we derive a surface free energy, while handling divergences…
Although Casimir forces are inseparable from their fluctuations, little is known about these fluctuations in soft matter systems. We use the membrane stress tensor to study the fluctuations of the membrane-mediated Casimir-like force. This…
The interplay of interactions and disorder in two-dimensional (2D) electron systems has actively been studied for decades. The paradigmatic approach involves starting with a clean Fermi liquid and perturbing the system with both disorder…
We explore the non-linear dynamics of two parallel periodically patterned metal surfaces that are coupled by the zero-point fluctuations of the electromagnetic field between them. The resulting Casimir force generates for asymmetric…