Related papers: Mesoscale Structure of Chiral Nematic Shells
Controlling optical chirality at the subwavelength scales is essential for many applications of nanophotonic structures in polarization optics, sensing, and nonlinear photonics. Achieving a strong chiroptical response in planar dielectric…
We develop the scaled particle theory to describe the thermodynamic properties and orientation ordering of a binary mixture of hard spheres (HS) and hard spherocylinders (HSC) confined in a disordered porous medium. Using this theory the…
Recent experiments on vesicles formed from block copolymers with liquid-crystalline side-chains reveal a rich variety of vesicle morphologies. The additional internal order ("structure") developed by these self-assembled block copolymer…
A nematic liquid crystal in contact with a grating surface possessing an alternating stripe pattern of locally homeotropic and planar anchoring is studied within the Frank--Oseen model. The combination of both chemical and geometrical…
The phenomenological Landau-de Gennes (LdG) model is a powerful continuum theory to describe the macroscopic state of nematic liquid crystals. However, it is invariably less accurate and less physically informed than the molecular-level…
Chiral photonics aims to control and engineer light handedness for many applications in optical communications, biological and chemical sensing, and quantum technologies. While traditional approaches focus on engineering strong linear…
In many biological materials with a hierarchical structure there is an intriguing and unique mechanism responsible for the 'propagation' of order from the molecular to the nano- or micro-scale level. Here we present a much simpler molecular…
One of the central experimental efforts in nematic colloids research aims to explore how the interplay between the geometry of particles along with the accompanying nematic director deformations and defects around them can provide a means…
Liquid crystals (LCs) composed of mesogens play important roles in various scientific and engineering problems. How a system with many mesogens can enter a LC state is an interesting and important problem. Using stiff and free-joint…
Systems with holes, such as colloidal handlebodies and toroidal droplets, have been studied in the nematic liquid crystal (NLC) 4-cyano-4'-pentylbiphenyl (5CB): both point and ring topological defects can occur within each hole and around…
The assembly of filamentous bundles with controlled diameters is common in biological systems and desirable for the development of nanomaterials. We discuss dynamical simulations and free energy calculations on patchy spheres with chiral…
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…
Chiral additives in the nematic liquid crystal can alter the dynamics of point defects moving on a disclination line. They exert a constant force on defects, leading to the bimodal distribution of distances between them at long times. The…
This paper presents a 3D mesh adaptivity strategy on unstructured tetrahedral meshes by a posteriori error estimates based on metrics, studied on the case of a nonlinear finite element minimization scheme for the Landau-de Gennes free…
Phase-ordering dynamics in nematic liquid crystals has been the subject of much active investigation in recent years in theory, experiments and simulations. With a rapid quench from the isotropic to nematic phase a large number of…
Liquid shells (e.g. double emulsions, vesicles etc.) are susceptible to interfacial instability and rupturing when driven out of mechanical equilibrium. This poses a significant challenge for the design of liquid shell based micro-machines,…
Topological defects are a ubiquitous phenomenon in diverse physical systems. In nematic liquid crystals (LCs), they are dynamic, physicochemically distinct, sensitive to stimuli, and are thereby promising for a range of applications.…
Orientational and positional ordering properties of liquid crystal monolayers are examined by means of Fundamental-Measure Density Functional Theory. Particles forming the monolayer are modeled as hard parallelepipeds of square section of…
Consideration is given to the effects of inhomogeneous shear flow (both regular and chaotic) on nematic liquid crystals in a planar geometry. The Landau--de Gennes equation coupled to an externally-prescribed flow field is the basis for the…
We study analytically the development of gravitational instability in an expanding shell having finite thickness. We consider three models for the radial density profile of the shell: (i) an analytic uniform-density model, (ii) a…