Related papers: Mesoscale Structure of Chiral Nematic Shells
A systematic analysis of defect textures in facetted nanoparticles with polygonal configurations embedded in a nematic matrix is performed using the Landau-de Gennes model, homeotropic strong anchoring in a square domain with uniform…
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 bent-core liquid crystals (LCs) are highly regarded as the next-generation materials for electro-optic devices. The nematic (N) phase of these LCs possesses highly ordered smectic-like cybotactic clusters which are promising in terms of…
Emerging technologies based on liquid crystal (LC) materials increasingly leverage the presence of nanoscale defects, unlike the canonical application of LCs -- LC displays. The inherent nanoscale characteristics of LC defects present both…
The understanding of self-organization in the twist-bend nematic $(N_\text{TB})$ phase, identified in 2011 in liquid crystal dimers, is at the forefront of soft matter research worldwide. This new nematic phase develops structural chirality…
Building on the striking similarity between the structure of the spindle during mitosis in living cells and nematic textures in confined liquid crystals, we use a continuum model of two-dimensional nematic liquid crystal droplets, to…
Chiral nematic liquid crystals exhibit both a helical planar ground state with uniform twist and a metastable defect-rich focal conic texture, and can be switched between the two microstructures via application of transient voltage pulses.…
We investigate the structure of nematic liquid crystal thin films described by the Landau--de Gennes tensor-valued order parameter with Dirichlet boundary conditions of nonzero degree. We prove that as the elasticity constant goes to zero a…
The geometric shape, symmetry, and topology of colloidal particles often allow for controlling colloidal phase behavior and physical properties of these soft matter systems. In liquid crystalline dispersions, colloidal particles with low…
By molecular modeling we demonstrate that the nematic long-range order discovered in bent-core liquid crystal systems should reveal further spatially homogeneous phases. Two of them are identified as a tetrahedratic nematic ($N_T$) phase…
A micrometer-scale elastic shell immersed in a nematic liquid crystal may be deformed by the host if the cost of deformation is comparable to the cost of elastic deformation of the nematic. Moreover, such inclusions interact and form chains…
It is shown that the inhomogeneous chiral condensate in the Gross-Neveu (GN) model takes the chiral spiral form, even though the thermodynamic functional depends only on the chiral scalar density. It is the inhomogeneity of the chiral…
Anisotropic fluids, such as nematic liquid crystals, can form non-spherical equilibrium shapes known as tactoids. Predicting the shape of these structures as a function of material parameters is challenging and paradigmatic of a broader…
Motivated by experiments on colloidal membranes composed of chiral rod-like viruses, we use Monte Carlo methods to determine the phase diagram for the liquid crystalline order of the rods and the membrane shape. We generalize the…
During the early developmental process of organisms, the formation of the left-right laterality requires a subtle mechanism, as it is associated with other principal body axes. Any inherent chiral feature in an egg cell can in principal…
Thin solids often develop elastic instabilities and subsequently complex, multiscale deformation patterns. Revealing the organizing principles of this spatial complexity has ramifications for our understanding of morphogenetic processes in…
We use molecular dynamics to study the ordering of a nematic liquid crystal around a spherical particle or droplet. Homeotropic boundary conditions and strong anchoring create a hedgehog director configuration on the particle surface and in…
This study investigates the influence of chirality, viscous effects, and confinement geometry on the flow dynamics and defect structures of cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) using numerical simulations. As chiral strength increases,…
The assembly of colloids in nematic liquid crystals via topological defects has been extensively studied for spherical particles, and investigations of other colloid shapes have revealed a wide array of new assembly behaviors. We show,…
A spontaneous buckling transition in thin layers of monodomain nematic liquid crystalline gel was observed by polarized light microscopy. The coupling between the orientational ordering of liquid crystalline solvent and the translational…