Related papers: Waltzing route towards double-helix formation in c…
Colloidal particles dispersed in a liquid crystal lead to distortions of the director field. The distortions are responsible for long-range effective colloidal interactions whose asymptotic behaviour is well understood. The short distance…
Liquid crystals can self-organize into a layered smectic phase. While the smectic layers are typically straight forming a lamellar pattern in bulk, external confinement may drastically distort the layers due to the boundary conditions…
Recent theories predict that when a supercooled liquid approaches the glass transition, particle clusters with a special "amorphous order" nucleate within the liquid, which lead to static correlations dictating the dramatic slowdown of…
Many solid materials and liquid crystals exhibit geometric frustration, meaning that they have an ideal local structure that cannot fill up space. For that reason, the global phase must be a compromise between the ideal local structure and…
We consider crystal formation of particles with dipole-dipole interactions that are confined to move in a one-dimensional helical geometry with their dipole moments oriented along the symmetry axis of the confining helix. The stable…
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 numerically how multiple deformable capsules squeeze into a constriction. This situation is largely encountered in microfluidic chips designed to manipulate living cells, which are soft entities. We use fully three-dimensional…
This paper reviews the complex ordered structures induced by chirality in liquid crystals. In general, chirality favors a twist in the orientation of liquid-crystal molecules. In some cases, as in the cholesteric phase, this favored twist…
We study the non-equilibrium dynamics of two dimensional planar ion Coulomb crystals undergoing a structural buckling transition to a three plane configuration, driven by a reduction of the transverse confining frequency. This phase…
An experimental and theoretical study of lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals (LCLCs) confined in cylinders with degenerate planar boundary conditions elucidates LCLC director configurations. When the Frank saddle-splay modulus is more than…
In this work we numerically study the switching dynamics of a 2D cholesteric emulsion droplet immersed in an isotropic fluid under an electric field, which is either uniform or rotating with constant speed. The overall dynamics depend…
We numerically study the dynamics of quasi-two dimensional cholesteric liquid crystal droplets in the presence of a time-dependent electric field, rotating at constant angular velocity. A surfactant sitting at droplet interface is also…
There is considerable interest in understanding and controlling topological defects in nematic liquid crystals (LCs). Confinement, in the form of droplets, has been particularly effective in that regard. Here, we employ the Landau-de Gennes…
We consider director configurations of cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) cells with two plane confining substrates. Exact solutions of the Euler-Lagrange equations for out-of-plane orientations of the easy axes that correspond to…
We present a theoretical model which describes the polarization modulated and layer undulated structure of the B7 phase and gives the phase transition from the synclinic ferroelectric B2 phase to the B7 phase as observed experimentally. The…
Helices are not generic outcomes of polymer collapse. Collapsed conformations of semiflexible polymers with isotropic attractions typically form globules, toroids, or rod-like structures, as seen in simulations and described by…
We explore the non-equilibrium dissipative dynamics of a system of identical charged particles trapped on a closed helix. The particles are subject to an external force accelerating them along the underlying structure. The effective…
The role of applied fields on the structure of liquid crystals confined to shell geometries has been studied in past theoretical work, providing strategies to produce liquid crystal shells with controlled defect structure or valence.…
We study elastic interactions between colloidal particles and deformation landscapes of undulations in a cholesteric liquid crystal under an electric field applied normal to cholesteric layers. The onset of undulation instability is…
We examine the changeover in the particle configurations and the dynamics in dense Lennard-Jones binary mixtures composed of small and large particles. By varying the composition at a low temperature, we realize crystal with defects,…