Related papers: Wetting of cholesteric liquid crystals
Smectic liquid crystals are materials formed by stacking deformable, fluid layers. Though smectics prefer to have flat, uniformly-spaced layers, boundary conditions can impose curvature on the layers. Since the layer spacing and curvature…
Wrinkles commonly develop in a thin film deposited on a soft elastomer substrate when the film is subject to compression. Motivated by recent experiments [Agrawal et al., Soft Matter 8, 7138 (2012)] that show how wrinkle morphology can be…
Instabilities in thin elastic sheets, such as wrinkles, are of broad interest both from a fundamental viewpoint and also because of their potential for engineering applications. Nematic liquid crystal elastomers offer a new form of control…
Partially wetting nematic liquid crystal (NLC) films on substrates are unstable to dewetting-type instabilities due to destablizing solid/NLC interaction forces. These instabilities are modified by the nematic nature of the films, which…
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…
A partially miscible binary liquid mixture, composed of A and B particles, is considered theoretically under conditions for which a stable A-rich liquid phase is in thermal equilibrium with the vapor phase. The B-rich liquid is metastable.…
A liquid crystal optical device made of an optically anisotropic heterostructure is considered. The device consists of a cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) layer sandwiched by two phase-shifting anisotropic layers of a nematic liquid crystal…
Anisotropically wetting substrates enable useful control of droplet behavior across a range of applications. Usually, these involve chemically or physically patterning the substrate surface, or applying gradients in properties like…
We briefly discuss how the wetting properties of a fluid/solid interface can indirectly influence the diffusion properties of fluid confined between two solid walls. This influence is related to the variability of the hydrodynamic boundary…
The ordering of nanoparticles into predetermined configurations is of importance to the design of advanced technologies. In this work, we moderate the surface anchoring against the bulk elasticity of liquid crystals to dynamically shape…
In a nematic gel, the appearance of nematic order is accompanied by a spontaneous elongation of the gel parallel to the nematic director. If such a gel is made chiral, it has a tendency to form a cholesteric helical texture, in which local…
We study the dynamic properties of a model for wetting with two competing adsorbates on a planar substrate. The two species of particles have identical properties and repel each other. Starting with a flat interface one observes the…
Cholesteric Liquid Crystals (CLCs), subject to externally applied magnetic fields and confined between two parallel planar surfaces with strong homeotropic anchoring conditions, are found to undergo transitions to different types of…
We explore the rheology and flow-induced morphological changes of cholesteric liquid crystal patterns subject to Poiseuille flow within a slab geometry, and under different anchoring conditions at the wall. Our focus is particularly on the…
We describe the basic properties and consequences of introducing active stresses, with principal direction along the local director, in cholesteric liquid crystals. The helical ground state is found to be linearly unstable to extensile…
We report results of wetting on non-planar and heterogeneous surfaces calculated from an effective interfacial Hamiltonian model. The lack of translational invariance along the substrate induces a series of structural changes on the…
Close to sinusoidal substrates, simple fluids may undergo a filling transition, in which the fluid passes from a dry to a filled state, where the interface remains unbent but bound to the substrate. Increasing the surface field, the…
Instabilities are discussed which take place when a nematic liquid crystal (LC) layer, enclosed between a planar reference plate and a photosensitive substrate, is illuminated with polarized light from the reference side ({\it reverse}…
We consider a Lebwohl-Lasher model of chiral particles confined in a planar cell (slit pore) with different boundary conditions, and solve it using mean-field theory. The phase behaviour of the system with respect to temperature and pore…
We numerically investigate the phase behavior of thick shells of cholesteric liquid crystals with tangential anchoring at the shell boundary. For achiral liquid crystal, we demonstrate a thickness-dependent transition from a configuration…