Related papers: Wetting of cholesteric liquid crystals
The wetting of soft polymer substrates brings in multiple complexities as compared to the wetting on rigid substrates. The contact angle of the liquid is no longer governed by Young's law, but is affected by the substrate's bulk and surface…
Solid interfaces have intrinsic elasticity. However, in most experiments, this is obscured by bulk stresses. Through microscopic observations of the contact-line geometry of a partially wetting droplet on an anisotropically stretched…
The relation between wetting properties and geometric parameters of fractal surfaces are widely discussed on the literature and, however, there are still divergences on this topic. Here we propose a simple theoretical model to describe the…
We simulate colloids (radius $R \sim 1\mu$m) trapped at the interface between a cholesteric liquid crystal and an immiscible oil, at which the helical order (pitch p) in the bulk conflicts with the orientation induced at the interface,…
Capillary forces are involved in a variety of natural phenomena, ranging from droplet breakup to the physics of clouds. The forces from surface tension can also be exploited in industrial application provided the length scales involved are…
Extremely compliant elastic materials, such as thin membranes or soft gels, can be deformed when wetted by a liquid drop. It is commonly assumed that the solid capillarity in "soft wetting" can be treated in the same manner as liquid…
Liquid crystal elastomers realize a fascinating new form of soft matter that is a composite of a conventional crosslinked polymer gel (rubber) and a liquid crystal. These {\em solid} liquid crystal amalgams, quite similarly to their…
The stability of thin liquid coatings is of fundamental interest in every- day life. Homogeneous and non-volatile liquid coatings may dewet either by heterogeneous nucleation, thermal nucleation, or spinodal dewetting. Wetting and dewetting…
Liquid wetting of a surface is omnipresent in nature and the advance of micro-fabrication and assembly techniques in recent years offers increasing ability to control this phenomenon. Here, we identify how surface roughness influences the…
Ionic liquid crystals (ILCs) are anisotropic mesogenic molecules which additionally carry charges. This combination gives rise to a complex interplay of the underlying (anisotropic) contributions to the pair interactions. It promises…
We investigate the wetting properties of the simplest element of an array of random fibers: two rigid fibers crossing with an inclination angle and in contact with a droplet of a perfectly wetting liquid. We show experimentally that the…
Starch solutions, which are strongly non-Newtonian, show a surface instability, when subjected to a load. A droplet of the fluid is sandwiched between two glass plates and a weight varying from 1 to 5 kgs. is placed on the top plate. The…
Chromonic liquid crystals (CLCs) are lyotropic materials which are attracting growing interest for their adaptability to living systems. A considerable body of works has been devoted to exploring their properties and applications. In this…
As a first step towards a microscopic understanding of the effective interaction between colloidal particles suspended in a solvent we study the wetting behavior of one-component fluids at spheres and fibers. We describe these phenomena…
We model a cholesteric liquid crystal as a planar uniaxial multilayer system, where the orientation of each layer differs slightly from that of the adjacent one. This allows us to analytically simplify the otherwise acutely complicated…
Surface tension at cavity walls can play havoc with the mechanical properties of perforated soft solids when the cavities are filled with a fluid. This study is an investigation of the macroscopic elastic properties of elastomers embedding…
The anchoring of nematic liquid crystals on surfaces with grafted liquid crystalline chain molecules is studied by computer simulations and within a mean field approach. The computer simulations show that a swollen layer of collectively…
We propose the use of topographic modulation of surfaces to select and localize particles in nematic colloids. By considering convex and concave deformations of one of the confining surfaces we show that the colloid-flat surface repulsion…
We investigated the properties of dichroic cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) being in external static magnetic field directed along helix axis. We have shown that in the case of the wavelength dependence of magneto-optic activity…
The nonlinear elastic properties of nematic liquid crystals have acquired new interest with the recent experimental observation of bulk modulated nematic phases which are composed by achiral molecules. We extend the Oseen-Zocher-Frank's…