Related papers: Principles of thermal design with nematic liquid c…
This work investigates how a thermal diode can be designed from a nematic liquid crystal confined inside a cylindrical capillary. In the case of homeotropic anchoring, a defect structure called escaped radial disclination arises. The…
Nematic solids respond strongly to changes in ambient heat or light, significantly differently parallel and perpendicular to the director. This phenomenon is well characterized for uniform director fields, but not for defect textures. We…
Linear defects such as dislocations and disclinations in ordered materials attract foreign particles since they replace strong elastic distortions at the defect cores. In this work, we explore the behavior of isotropic droplets nucleating…
The ability to manipulate polar entities with multiple external fields opens exciting possibilities for emerging functionalities and novel applications in spin systems, photonics, metamaterials, and soft matter. Liquid crystals (LCs),…
Disclinations lines play a key role in many physical processes, from the fracture of materials to the formation of the early universe. Achieving versatile control over disclinations is key to developing novel electro-optical devices,…
Nematic elastomers and glasses deform spontaneously when subjected to temperature changes. This property can be exploited in the design of heterogeneously patterned thin sheets that deform into a non-trivial shape when heated or cooled. In…
The influence of controlable parameters like temperature and wavelength on the trajectories of light in a nematic liquid crystal with topological defects is studied through a geometric model. The model incorporates phenomenological details…
Confining a liquid crystal imposes topological constraints on the orientational order, allowing global control of equilibrium systems by manipulation of anchoring boundary conditions. In this article, we investigate whether a similar…
Liquid crystal elastomers are rubbers with liquid crystal order. They contract along their nematic director when heated or illuminated. The shape changes are large and occur in a relatively narrow temperature interval, or at low…
We introduce a new class of non-isothermal models describing the evolution of nematic liquid crystals and prove their consistency with the fundamental laws of classical Thermodynamics. The resulting system of equations captures all…
Topological photonics harnesses the physics of topological insulators to control the behavior of light. Photonic modes robust against material imperfections are an example of such control. In this work, we propose a soft-matter platform…
Current vapor-compression technology is based on the gas-liquid transition of hazardous gas. The alternative cooling technology focuses on the solid caloric material. A new liquid barocaloric material, i.e. the liquid crystal, is proved to…
Computer simulations are presented of the isotropic-to-nematic transition in a liquid crystal confined between two parallel plates a distance H apart. The plates are neutral and do not impose any anchoring on the particles. Depending on the…
We show theoretically that thermomechanical effects in dye-doped nematic liquid crystals when illuminated by laser beams, can become important and lead to molecular reorientation at intensities substantially lower than that needed for…
Topological defects play a pivotal role in the physics of liquid crystals and represent one of the most prominent and well studied aspects of mesophases. While in two-dimensional nematics, disclinations are traditionally treated as…
We introduce a coarse-grained description of the surface energy of a nematic liquid crystal. The thermal fluctuations of the nematic director close to the surface renormalize at macroscopic scales the bare surface potential in a…
We study light scattering by a hedgehog-like and linear disclination topological defects in a nematic liquid crystal by a metric approach. Light propagating near such defects feels an effective metric equivalent to the spatial part of the…
Thermoelectric devices are heat engines, which operate as generators or refrigerators using the conduction electrons as a working fluid. The thermoelectric heat-to-work conversion efficiency has always been typically quite low, but much…
Recent studies of azo-dye doped liquid crystal elastomers show a strong photomechanical response. We report on models that predict experimental results that suggest photothermal heating is the dominant mechanism in a planar constrained…
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…