Related papers: Liquid crystalline growth within a phase-field cry…
Directed growth, anisotropic cell shapes, and confinement drive self-organization in multicellular systems. We investigate the influence of particle shape on the distribution and dynamics of nematic microdomains in a minimal in-silico model…
We study avenues to shape multistability and shape-morphing in flexible crystalline membranes of cylindrical topology, enabled by glide mobility of dislocations. Using computational modeling, we obtain states of mechanical equilibrium…
The plant microtubule cortical array is a striking feature of all growing plant cells. It consists of a more or less homogeneously distributed array of highly aligned microtubules connected to the inner side of the plasma membrane and…
The ability to manipulate polar entities with multiple external fields opens exciting possibilities for emerging functionalities and novel applications in spin systems, photonics, metamaterials, and soft matter. Liquid crystals (LCs),…
The growth of crystals confined in porous or cellular materials is ubiquitous in Nature and industry. Confinement affects the formation of biominerals in living organisms, of minerals in the Earth's crust and of salt crystals damaging…
We study experimentally the nonequilibrium phase behaviour of a horizontal monolayer of macroscopic rods. The motion of the rods in two dimensions is driven by vibrations in the vertical direction. Aside from the control variables of…
Plasticity in body-centered cubic (BCC) nanocrystals is often associated with twin nucleation phenomena under extreme loading conditions. Here, we reveal unconventional twinning pathways that operate at the intersection of crystal…
The anisotropic phase-field crystal model recently proposed and used by Prieler et al. [J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 21, 464110 (2009)] is derived from microscopic density functional theory for anisotropic particles with fixed orientation.…
Transformations accompanying shape-instability govern the morphological configuration and distribution of the phases in a microstructure. Owing to the influence of the microstructure on the properties of a material, the stability of…
In vivo and in vitro systems of cells and extra-cellular matrix (ECM) systems are well known to form ordered patterns of orientationally aligned fibers. Here, we interpret them as active analogs of the (disordered) isotropic to the…
In order to address the growth of crystals in veins, a multiphase-field model is used to capture the dynamics of crystals precipitating from a super-saturated solution. To gain a detailed understanding of the polycrystal growth phenomena in…
A random growth lattice filling model of percolation with touch and stop growth rule is developed and studied numerically on a two dimensional square lattice. Nucleation centers are continuously added one at a time to the empty sites and…
The study of polycrystalline materials requires theoretical and computational techniques enabling multiscale investigations. The amplitude expansion of the phase field crystal model (APFC) allows for describing crystal lattice properties on…
Certain models with purely repulsive pair interactions can form cluster crystals with multiply-occupied lattice sites. Simulating these models' equilibrium properties is, however, quite challenging. Here, we develop an expanded…
We describe an experimental apparatus for making detailed morphological observations of the growth of isolated plate-like ice crystals from water vapor. Each crystal develops a plate-on-pedestal (POP) geometry, in which a large, thin,…
According to classical grain growth laws, grain growth is driven by the minimization of surface energy and will continue until a single grain prevails. These laws do not take into account the lattice anisotropy and the details of the…
We study smectic-liquid-crystal order in a cell with a heterogeneous substrate imposing surface random positional and orientational pinnings. Proposing a minimal random elastic model, we demonstrate that, for a thick cell, the smectic state…
Phase separation of sequence-disordered liquid crystalline polymers, a promising class of technological and biological relevance, is studied by field theory, and thermodynamic mechanisms responsible for orientational ordering observed in…
The effect of short chain grafting on the liquid crystalline (LC) ordering of nano-crystals is investigated using molecular dynamics simulations of a coarse-grained grafted nano-rod model. Monodisperse nano-rods, with aspect ratios typical…
Snow crystals growing from water vapor occasionally exhibit morphologies with three-fold (trigonal) symmetry, even though the ice crystal lattice has a molecular structure with six-fold symmetry. In extreme cases, thin platelike snow…