Related papers: Spinodal instabilities in polydisperse lyotropic n…
Liquid crystals have attracted enormous interest because of the variety of their phases and richness of their application. The interplay of general physical symmetries and specific molecular features generates a myriad of different…
Disclination configurations of a nematic liquid crystal are studied within a self-consistent molecular field theory. The theory is based on a tensor order parameter, and can accommodate anisotropic elastic energies without the known…
Many nanoparticle-based chiral liquid crystals are composed of polydisperse rod-shaped particles with considerable spread in size or shape, affecting the mesoscale chiral properties in, as yet, unknown ways. Using an algebraic…
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,…
Polymers are a primary building block in many biomaterials, often interacting with anisotropic backgrounds. While previous studies have considered polymer dynamics within nematic solvents, rarely are the the effects of anisotropic viscosity…
Liquid crystals are assemblies of rod-like molecules which self-organize to form mesophases, in-between ordinary liquids and anisotropic crystals. At each point, the molecules collectively orient themselves along a privileged direction,…
Living polymers composed of non-covalently bonded building blocks with weak backbone flexibility may self-assemble into thermoresponsive lyotropic liquid crystals. We demonstrate that the reversible polymer assembly and phase behavior can…
We present the first experimental measurements of the isotropic and nematic phases of mixtures of thin, charged semiflexible fd virus, and thick, fd-PEG created by covalently grafting poly-(ethylene glycol) to the the surface of fd, rods.…
With reference to spatially non-local nematic liquid crystals, we develop a theory of optical spatial solitons and modulational instability in anisotropic media with arbitrarily large birefringence. Asymmetric spatial profiles and…
We study the different phases of a system of monodispersed hard rods of length $k$ on a cubic lattice using an efficient cluster algorithm which can simulate densities close to the fully-packed limit. For $k\leq 4$, the system is disordered…
Using scaled-particle theory for binary mixtures of two-dimensional hard particles with rotational freedom, we analyse the stability of nematic phases and the demixing phase behaviour of a variety of mixtures, focussing on cases where at…
We present theory and simulation of simultaneous chemical demixing and phase ordering in a polymer-liquid crystal mixture in conditions where isotropic-isotropic phase separation is metastable with respect to isotropic-nematic phase…
The complex physics of self-assembly in colloidal crystals on deformable interfaces and surfaces poses interesting possibilities for the designability and synthesis of next-generation metamaterials. The goal of this article is to…
The recent experimental discovery of ferroelectric and splay nematic phases has sparked interest in comprehending the crucial molecular features necessary to stabilize these innovative structures. This study advances the ongoing discourse…
A computational study of morphological instabilities of a two-dimensional nematic front under directional growth was performed using a Landau-de Gennes type quadrupolar tensor order parameter model for the first-order isotropic/nematic…
We perform dynamical simulations of a two-dimensional active nematic fluid in coexistence with an isotropic fluid. Drops of active nematic become elongated, and an effective anchoring develops at the nematic-isotropic interface. The…
Toroidal nematics are droplets of nematic liquid crystals in the form of a circular torus. When the nematic director is subject to planar degenerate boundary conditions, the bend-only director field with vector lines along the parallels of…
We present a phenomenological treatment of diffusion-driven martensitic phase transformations in multi-component crystalline solids that arise from non-convex free energies in mechanical and chemical variables. The treatment describes…
We construct a phenomenological Landau-de Gennes theory for hard colloidal rods by performing an order parameter expansion of the chemical-potential dependent grand potential. By fitting the coefficients to known results of Onsager theory,…
Substrates which are chemically or topographically patterned induce a variety of liquid crystal textures. The response of the liquid crystal to competing surface orientations, typical of patterned substrates, is determined by the anisotropy…