Related papers: Instabilities, defects, and defect ordering in an …
Different liquid crystalline phases with long-range orientational but not positional order, so-called nematic phases, are scarce. It rarely occurs that a new nematic phase is discovered and such event is inevitably accompanied by a great…
Topological defects are an essential part of the structure and dynamics of all liquid crystals, and they are particularly important in experiments and simulations on active liquid crystals. In a recent paper, Vromans and Giomi [Soft Matter,…
Defects in liquid crystals are of great practical importance and theoretical interest. Despite tremendous efforts, predicting the location and transition of defects under various topological constraint and external field remains to be a…
We study elasticity of spontaneously orientationally-ordered amorphous solids, characterized by a vanishing transverse shear modulus, as realized for example by nematic elastomers and gels. We show that local heterogeneities and elastic…
A continuum theory is employed to numerically study the equilibrium orientation and defect structures of a circular cylindrical particle with flat ends under a homeotropic anchoring condition in a uniform nematic medium. Different aspect…
From incompressible flows to electrostatics, harmonic functions can provide solutions to many two-dimensional problems and, similarly, the director field of a planar nematic can be determined using complex analysis. We derive a closed-form…
Phase-ordering dynamics in nematic liquid crystals has been the subject of much active investigation in recent years in theory, experiments and simulations. With a rapid quench from the isotropic to nematic phase a large number of…
We study the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematic film is topologically constraint. These topological constraints allow to control the non-equilibrium dynamics of the active system. We consider ellipsoidal shapes for…
We present a theoretical study of the director fields and energetics of nematic liquid crystal shells with two pairs of surface defects. The pairs of defects can undergo abrupt transitions between a configuration of maximum separation to at…
The effects of an electric field on the flow patterns and defect dynamics of two-dimensional active nematics are numerically investigated. We found that field-induced director reorientation causes anisotropic active turbulence characterized…
Active nematics are an important new paradigm in soft condensed matter systems. They consist of rod-like components with an internal driving force pushing them out of equilibrium. The resulting fluid motion exhibits chaotic advection, in…
Disordered hyperuniform systems are exotic states of matter that completely suppress large-scale density fluctuations like crystals, and yet possess no Bragg peaks similar to liquids or glasses. Such systems have been discovered in a…
We propose a simple deterministic dynamic equation and reveal the mechanism of large-scale endless evolvement of spatial density inhomogeneity in active nematic. We determine the phase regions analytically. The interplay of density,…
We investigate the dynamics of an active particle in two-dimensional spherical crystals, which provide an ideal environment to illustrate the interplay of active particle and crystallographic defects. A moving active particle is observed to…
Field theories predict that phase transitions sequentially breaking continuous and discrete symmetries can generate hybrid topological structures in which defects of different dimensionalities merge. We report experimental and numerical…
The paper is concerned with various issues surrounding the mathematical description of defects in models of liquid crystals, drawing on experience from solid mechanics. The roles played by a suitable choice of function space and by the…
When driven by nonequilibrium fluctuations, particle systems may display phase transitions and physical behaviour with no equilibrium counterpart. We study a two-dimensional particle model initially proposed to describe driven non-Brownian…
Recent experiments report that the long looked for thermotropic biaxial nematic phase has been finally detected in some thermotropic liquid crystalline systems. Inspired by these experimental observations we concentrate on some elementary…
The common description of the electrical behavior of a nematic liquid crystal as an anisotropic dielectric medium with (weak) ohmic conductivity is extended to an electrodiffusion model with two active ionic species. Under appropriate, but…
Disordered solids, straddling the solid-fluid boundary, lack a comprehensive continuum mechanical description. They exhibit a complex microstructure wherein multiple meta-stable states exist. Deforming disordered solids induces particles…