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Nematic and columnar phases of lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals (LCLCs) have been long studied for their fundamental and applied prospects in material science and medical diagnostics. LCLC phases represent different self-assembled states…
Filamentous bacteriophages fd are viral particles, highly monodisperse in size, that have been widely used as a model colloidal system for studying the self-assembly of rod-shaped particles as well as a versatile template in nanoscience. In…
Biomembranes, primarily composed of lipid bilayers, are not merely passive barriers but dynamic and complex materials whose shapes are governed by the principles of soft matter physics. This review explores the shape problem in biomembranes…
We investigate the isotropic-to-nematic phase transition in systems of hard helical particles, using Onsager theory and Monte Carlo computer simulations. Motivation of this work resides in the ubiquity of the helical shape motif in many…
Liquid crystal elastomers are special cross-linked polymer materials combining the large elastic deformability of elastomers with the orientational orders of liquid crystals. This model exhibits markedly different phenomena than the liquid…
A spontaneous buckling transition in thin layers of monodomain nematic liquid crystalline gel was observed by polarized light microscopy. The coupling between the orientational ordering of liquid crystalline solvent and the translational…
Hard models for particle interactions have played a crucial role in the understanding of the structure of condensed matter. In particular, they help to explain the formation of oriented phases in liquids made of anisotropic molecules or…
The hydrodynamic stresses created by active particles can destabilise orientational order present in the system. This is manifested, for example, by the appearance of a bend instability in active nematics or in quasi-2-dimensional living…
The observation recently of 12-fold quasicrystals in polymers, nanoparticle mixture and 12-fold and 18-fold quasicrystals in colloidal solutions are important events for the study of quasicrystals. To describe the mechanical behaviour we…
Cholesteric liquid crystals can exhibit spatial patterns in molecular alignment at interfaces that can be exploited for particle assembly. These patterns emerge from the competition between bulk and surface energies, tunable with the system…
Binary mixtures of semiflexible polymers with the same chain length but different persistence lengths separate into two coexisting different nematic phases when the osmotic pressure of the lyotropic solution is varied. Molecular Dynamics…
Liquid crystals have attracted enormous interest because of the variety of their phases and richness of their application. The interplay of general physical symmetries and specific molecular features generates a myriad of different…
Chemical design of block copolymers makes it possible to create polymer vesicles with tunable microscopic structure. Here we focus on a model of a vesicle made of smectic liquid-crystalline block copolymers at zero temperature. The vesicle…
Using the classical density functional theory of freezing and Monte Carlo computer simulations, we explore the liquid-crystalline phase behavior of hard rectangles on flat and cylindrical manifolds. Moreover, we study the effect of a static…
Lyotropic liquid crystals can display rich phase behaviour and self-organisation, yet the physical principles underlying their self-assembly into large scale patterns remains understudied. Here, we combine theory, simulations and…
Lipid vesicles consist of aqueous cores surrounded by a bilayer of phospholipids. Hybrid polymer-lipid vesicles incorporate both polymers and lipids, offering promising properties for developing pharmaceuticals, biosensors, and artificial…
Rod-shaped colloids with attractive tips can form linear aggregates that may subsequently undergo hierarchical self-assembly into nematic fluids. Inspired by recent modelling efforts on chromonic liquid crystals, composed of discotic…
Determining the equilibrium configuration and shape of curved two-dimensional films with (generalized) liquid crystalline (LC) order is a difficult infinite dimensional problem of direct relevance to the study of generalized polymersomes,…
The effect of rough walls on the phase behaviour of a confined liquid crystal (LC) fluid is studied using constant pressure Monte Carlo simulations. The LC is modelled as a fluid of soft ellipsoidal molecules and the rough walls are…
Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are soft phase-changing solids that exhibit large reversible contractions upon heating, Goldstone-like soft modes and resultant microstructural instabilities. We heat a planar LCE slab to isotropic, clamp…