Related papers: Evolution of liquid crystal microstructure during …
When stressed sufficiently, solid materials yield and deform plastically via reorganization of microscopic constituents. Indeed, it is possible to alter the micro-structure of materials by judicious application of stress, an empirical pro-…
A two dimensional amorphous material is modeled as an assembly of mesoscopic elemental pieces coupled together to form an elastically coherent structure. Plasticity is introduced as the existence of different minima in the energy landscape…
The liquid crystalline compound, forming the glass of the smectic C$_A$* phase, is investigated by the X-ray diffraction in the 18-298 K range. The characteristic distances within the smectic C$_A$* phase are determined. The electron…
This study reports a general scenario for the out-of-equilibrium features of collapsing polymeric architectures. We use molecular dynamics simulations to characterize the coarsening kinetics, in bad solvent, for several macromolecular…
Properties of disordered nematic elastomers and gels are theoretically investigated with emphasis on the roles of non-local elastic interactions and crosslinking conditions. Networks originally crosslinked in the isotropic phase lose their…
Constitutive equations are derived for the viscoelastoplastic response of amorphous glassy polymers at isothermal loading with small strains. A polymer is treated as an ensemble of cooperatively relaxing regions (CRR) which rearrange at…
We present a theory for the low-frequency, long-wavelength dynamics of soft smectic-C elastomers with locked-in smectic layers. Our theory, which goes beyond pure hydrodynamics, predicts a dynamic soft elasticity of these elastomers and…
We analyze a mesoscopic model of a shear stress material with a three dimensional slab geometry, under an external quasistatic deformation of a simple shear type. Relaxation is introduced in the model as a mechanism by which an unperturbed…
Medium or large amplitude oscillatory shear (M/LAOS) is sensitive to polymer chain structure, yet poses unsolved challenges for 'a priori' structural characterisation. In this letter, we present a MAOS protocol applied to near-monodisperse…
The known ground state of ultrathin smectic films confined to the surface of a sphere is described by four +1/2 defects assembled on a great circle and a director which follows geodesic lines. Using a simple perturbative approach we show…
Nematic elastomers are rubbery solids which have liquid crystals incorporated into their polymer chains. These materials display many unusual mechanical properties, one such being the ability to form fine-scale microstructure. In this work,…
Smectic liquid crystals are materials formed by stacking deformable, fluid layers. Though smectics prefer to have flat, uniformly-spaced layers, boundary conditions can impose curvature on the layers. Since the layer spacing and curvature…
We discuss relaxation and aging processes in the one- and two-dimensional $ABC$ models. In these driven diffusive systems of three particle types, biased exchanges in one direction yield a coarsening process characterized in the long time…
Using Langevin dynamics simulations, we study elastic response of single semiflexible polyelectrolytes to an external force pulling on the chain ends, to mimic the stretching of DNA molecules by optical tweezers. The linear chains are…
In a recent publication we established an analogy between the free energy of a hard sphere system and the energy of an elastic network [1]. This result enables one to study the free energy landscape of hard spheres, in particular to define…
Previous theoretical studies of calamitic (i.e., rod-like) ionic liquid crystals (ILCs) based on an effective one-species model led to indications of a novel smectic-A phase with a layer spacing being much larger than the length of the…
By equilibrating condensed DNA arrays against reservoirs of known osmotic stress and examining them with several structural probes, it has been possible to achieve a detailed thermodynamic and structural characterization of the change…
The smectic C (smC) phase represents a unique class of liquid crystal phases characterised by the layered arrangement of molecules with tilted orientations with respect to layer normals. Building upon the real-valued tensorial smectic A…
We present a theory of the elasticity and fluctuations of the Smectic A and C phases in uniaxial, anisotropic disordered environments, e.g., stretched aerogel. We find that, bizarrely, the low-temperature, lower-symmetry Smectic $C$ phase…
We study the statics and the dynamics of domain patterns in proper hexagonal-orthorhombic ferroelastics; these patterns are of particular interest because they provide a rare physical realization of disclinations in crystals. Both our…