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Colloidal particles in a liquid crystal (LC) behave very differently from their counterparts in isotropic fluids. Elastic nature of the orientational order and surface anchoring of the director cause long-range anisotropic interactions and…
Electrically-controlled dynamics of fluids and particles at microscales is a fascinating area of research with applications ranging from microfluidics and sensing to sorting of biomolecules. The driving mechanisms are electric forces acting…
Active colloids and liquid crystals are capable of locally converting the macroscopically-supplied energy into directional motion and promise a host of new applications, ranging from drug delivery to cargo transport at the mesoscale. Here…
We develop a formal analogy between configurational stresses in two distinct physical systems, and study the flows that they induce when the configurations of interest include topological de- fects. The two systems in question are…
Active colloids in liquid crystals (ACLCs) is an active matter with qualitatively new facets of behavior as compared to active matter that becomes isotropic when relaxed into an equilibrium state. We discuss two classes of ACLCs: (i)…
Electrophoresis is a motion of charged dispersed particles relative to a fluid in a uniform electric field. The effect is widely used to separate macromolecules, to assemble colloidal structures, to transport particles in nano- and…
Electric field induced collective reorientation of nematic molecules placed between two flat parallel electrodes is of importance for both fundamental science and practical applications. This reorientation is either homogeneous over the…
Nonlinear electrokinetic phenomena, where electrically driven fluid flows depend nonlinearly on the applied voltage, are commonly encountered in aqueous suspensions of colloidal particles. A prime example is the induced-charge…
We study living liquid crystals (LLCs), which are an amalgam of nematic liquid crystals (LCs) and active matter (AM). These LLCs are placed in contact with surfaces which impose planar/homeotropic boundary conditions on the director field…
We describe electrophoresis of spherical dielectric particles in a uniformly aligned nematic medium with a negative dielectric anisotropy. A spherical particle that orients the liquid crystal (LC) perpendicularly to its surface moves under…
Finding new ionic conductors that enable significant advancements in the development of energy-storage devices is a challenging goal of current material science. Aside of material classes as ionic liquids or amorphous ion conductors, the…
Sessile droplets of a ferroelectric nematic liquid crystalline material were exposed to surface electric fields produced by pyroelectric and photogalvanic (photovoltaic) effects in X-cut iron-doped lithium niobate crystals. The resulting…
Suspended microparticles subjected to AC electrical fields collectively organize into band patterns perpendicular to the field direction. The bands further develop into zigzag shaped patterns, in which the particles are observed to…
We propose lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals (LCLCs) as a distinct class of materials for organic electronics. In water, the chromonic molecules stack on top of each other into elongated aggregates that form orientationally ordered…
We derive a mathematical model of a nematic electrolyte based on the Leslie-Ericksen theory of liquid crystal flow. Our goal is to investigate the nonlinear electrokinetic effects that occur because the nematic matrix is anisotropic, in…
Sorting and separation of microparticles is a challenging problem of interdisciplinary nature. Existing technologies can differentiate microparticles by their bulk properties, such as size, density, electric polarizability, etc. The next…
An electrokinetically-driven deterministic lateral displacement (e-DLD) device is proposed for the continuous, two-dimensional fractionation of suspensions in microfluidic platforms. The suspended species are driven through an array of…
We demonstrate several examples of driving and steering of colloids when dispersed in nematic liquid crystals. The driving mechanism is based on the principle of nonlinear electrophoresis which is mediated by the asymmetry in the structure…
We study ionic and mass transport in a liquid crystalline fluid film in its nematic phase under an applied electrostatic field. Both analytic and numerical solutions are given for some prototypical configurations of interest in…
We study how dispersions of colloidal particles in a cholesteric liquid crystal behave under a time-dependent electric field. By controlling the amplitude and shape of the applied field wave, we show that the system can be reproducibly…