Related papers: Discontinuous order parameters in liquid crystal t…
Liquid crystals are synthetic and biological viscoelastic anisotropic soft matter materials that combine liquid fluidity with crystal anisotropy and find use in optical devices, sensor/actuators, lubrication, super-fibers. Frequently…
Metal-organic frameworks are a novel family of chemically diverse materials, which are of interest across engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine-based disciplines. Since the development of the field in its current form more…
Rapid solidification leads to unique microstructural features, where a less studied topic is the formation of various crystalline defects, including high dislocation densities, as well as gradients and splitting of the crystalline…
In this article we discuss nonstationary models for inhomogeneous liquid crystals driven out of equilibrium by flow. Emphasis is put on those models which are used in the mathematics as well as in the physics literature, the overall goal…
In 3D nematic liquid crystals, disclination lines have a range of geometric structures. Locally, they may resemble $+1/2$ or $-1/2$ defects in 2D nematic phases, or they may have 3D twist. Here, we analyze the structure in terms of the…
Lipid membranes are abundant in living organisms, where they constitute a surrounding shell for cells and their organelles. There are many circumstances in which the deformations of lipid membranes are involved in living cells: fusion and…
Ordering of mobile defects in functional materials can give rise to fundamentally new phases possessing ferroic and multiferroic functionalities. Here we develop the Landau theory for strain induced ordering of defects (e.g. oxygen…
We describe a lattice Boltzmann algorithm to simulate liquid crystal hydrodynamics. The equations of motion are written in terms of a tensor order parameter. This allows both the isotropic and the nematic phases to be considered. Backflow…
Defects determine many important properties and applications of materials, ranging from doping in semiconductors, to conductivity in mixed ionic-electronic conductors used in batteries, to active sites in catalysts. The theoretical…
Motivated by the experimentally observed shear-induced destabilization and reorientation of smectic A like systems, we consider an extended formulation of smectic A hydrodynamics. We include both, the smectic layering (via the layer…
To enhance the understanding of the behavior of active nematic, it is important to understand the behavior of topological defects. In this paper, we study the configuration of topological defects of a two-dimensional active nematic around a…
Motivated by problems arising in tear film dynamics, we present a model for the extensional flow of thin sheets of nematic liquid crystal. The rod-like molecules of these substances impart an elastic contribution to its response. We rescale…
Due to the lack of long-range order, it remains challenging to characterize the structure of disordered solids and understand the nature of the glass transition. Here we propose a new structural order parameter by taking into account…
Active materials are those in which individual, uncoordinated local stresses drive the material out of equilibrium on a global scale. Examples of such assemblies can be seen across scales from schools of fish to the cellular cytoskeleton…
From the theory of topological defect formation proposed for the early universe, the so called Kibble mechanism, it follows that the density correlation functions of defects and anti-defects in a given system should be completely determined…
We demonstrate that a first order isotropic-to-nematic phase transition in liquid crystals can be succesfully modeled within the generalized Landau-de Gennes theory by selecting an appropriate combination of elastic constants. The numerical…
We introduce a field theoretic formalism enabling the direct study of dislocation and interstitial dynamics. Explicit expressions for the energies of such defects are given. We provide links to earlier numerical, discrete elastic, time…
There is a recent interest in studying odd elasticity in soft solids. Current focus has been on simple solids. However, many soft solids are structured and can exhibit nematic elasticity or viscoelasticity. Here we generalize the concept of…
We study the growth of aligned domains in nematic liquid crystals. Results are obtained solving the Beris-Edwards equations of motion using the lattice Boltzmann approach. Spatial anisotropy in the domain growth is shown to be a consequence…
Liquid crystals with molecules constrained to the tangent bundle of a curved surface show interesting phenomena resulting from the tight coupling of the elastic and bulk free energies of the liquid crystal with geometric properties of the…