Related papers: Microrheology in tumbling nematics of 8CB liquid c…
Particle tracking with a 0.98$\mu$m silica sphere is used in determining precessional motion of nematic director in nematic phase of 8CB liquid crystals, as it probes those oriented structures which are of the same wavelength as of the…
Many bent-core nematic liquid crystals exhibit unusual physical properties due to the presence of smectic clusters, known as "cybotactic" clusters in the nematic phase. Effect of these clusters on complex shear modulus ($G^*(\omega)$) of…
We report curling self-propulsion in aqueous emulsions of common mesogenic compounds. Nematic liquid crystal droplets self-propel in a surfactant solution with concentrations above the critical micelle concentration while undergoing…
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…
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 effects of dispersed aerosil nanoparticles on two of the phase transitions of the thermotropic liquid crystal material 4-n-pentylphenylthiol-4'-n-octyloxybenzoate 8barS5 have been studied using high-resolution x-ray diffraction…
Topological defects are distinctive signatures of liquid crystals. They profoundly affect the viscoelastic behavior of the fluid by constraining the orientational structure in a way that inevitably requires global changes not achievable…
Liquid crystals establish a nearly unique combination of thermodynamic, hydrodynamic, and topological behavior. This poses a challenge to their theoretical understanding and modeling. The arena where these effects come together is the…
Liquid crystals formed by acute-angle bent-core (ABC) molecules with a 1,7 naphthalene central core show an intriguing phase behavior with the nematic phase accompanied by poorly understood additional phases. In this work, we characterize…
The ground state of twist-bend nematic liquid crystals is a heliconical molecular arrangement in which the nematic director precesses uniformly about an axis, making a fixed angle with it. Both precession senses are allowed in the ground…
We use molecular dynamics to study the ordering of a nematic liquid crystal around a spherical particle or droplet. Homeotropic boundary conditions and strong anchoring create a hedgehog director configuration on the particle surface and in…
Aqueous dispersions of exfoliated, bile-salt stabilized single-wall carbon nanotubes exhibit a first order transition to a nematic liquid-crystalline phase. The nematic phase presents itself in the form of micron-sized nematic droplets also…
In twist-bend nematic (N\textsubscript{TB}) liquid crystals (LCs), the mean molecular orientation exhibits heliconical structure with nanoscale periodicity. On the mesoscopic scale, N\textsubscript{TB} resembles layered systems (like…
The properties of liquid crystals can be modelled using an order parameter which describes the variability of the local orientation of rod-like molecules. Defects in the director field can arise due to external factors such as applied…
We report the observation of a doubly-periodic surface defect-pattern in the liquid crystal 8CB, formed during the nematic--smectic A phase transition. The pattern results from the antagonistic alignment of the 8CB molecules, which is…
Dynamic simulations of the isotropic-nematic phase transformation of liquid crystal droplets under homeotropic anchoring are found to predict chiral symmetry-breaking dynamics. These observations occur when using material parameters for…
We present a study of the hydrodynamics of an active particle, a model squirmer, in an envi- ronment with a broken rotational symmetry: a nematic liquid crystal. By combining simulations with analytic calculations, we show that the…
Droplet breakup is a well studied phenomena in Newtonian fluids. One property of this behavior is that, independent of initial conditions, the minimum radius exhibits power law scaling with the time left to breakup tau. Because they have…
Dynamics of small particles, both living such as swimming bacteria and inanimate, such as colloidal spheres, has fascinated scientists for centuries. If one could learn how to control and streamline their chaotic motion, that would open…
The twist-bend nematic liquid crystal phase is a three-dimensional fluid in which achiral bent molecules spontaneously form an orientationally ordered macroscopically chiral heliconical winding of molecular scale pitch, in absence of…