Related papers: Tetrahedral Order in Liquid Crystals
Electronic nematic order has been reported in a rich landscape of materials, encompassing not only a range of intertwined correlated and topological phenomena, but also different underlying lattice symmetries. Motivated by these findings,…
Both uniaxial and biaxial nematic liquid crystals are defined by orientational ordering of their building blocks. While uniaxial nematics only orient the long molecular axis, biaxial order implies local order along three axes. As the…
Ferroelectric ordering in liquids is a fundamental question of physics. Here, we show that ferroelectric ordering of the molecules causes formation of recently reported splay nematic liquid-crystalline phase. As shown by dielectric…
Various possibilities of polar self-organisation in low molar mass nematic, smectic and columnar liquid crystals are discussed with particular focus on the underlying molecular symmetries and interactions. Distinction is made between vector…
Motivated in part by recent experiments on liquid crystals with bent-core molecules, which are observed to display a spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, we introduce a field theory of a 3rd-rank tensor order parameter T^{ijk} to describe…
The recent discovery of ferroelectric nematic liquid crystalline phases marks a major breakthrough in soft matter research. An intermediate phase, often observed between the nonpolar and the ferroelectric nematic phase, shows a distinct…
We show that the mechanical effect of light on the orientational ordering of the crystalline axis of a mesophase can be used to control the dynamics of the optical response of liquid crystal infiltrated photonic structures. The…
Liquid crystal materials exhibiting up to three nematic phases are reported. Dielectric response measurements show that while the lower temperature nematic phase has ferroelectric order and the highest temperature nematic phase is apolar,…
Liquid crystals establish a nearly unique combination of thermodynamic, hydrodynamic, and topological behavior. This poses a challenge to their theoretical understanding and modeling. The arena where these effects come together is the…
The phase-ordering kinetics of a bulk uniaxial nematic liquid crystal is addressed using techniques that have been successfully applied to describe ordering in the O(n) model. The method involves constructing an appropriate mapping between…
We use a fluctuating hydrodynamic approach to calculate the orientation fluctuations correlation functions of a thermotropic nematic liquid crystal in a nonequilibrium state induced by a stationay heat flux. Since in this nonequilibrium…
Partially phase-separated liquid-crystal/polymer dispersions display highly fibrillar domain morphologies that are dramatically different from the typical structures found in isotropic mixtures. To explain this, we numerically explore the…
The twist-bend nematic (Ntb) phase is a recent addition to the nematic (N) phases of liquid crystals (LCs). A net polar order in the Ntb phase under an external electric field was predicted in several recent theoretical studies but yet to…
Nematic liquid crystals exhibit configurations in which the underlying ordering changes markedly on macroscopic length scales. Such structures include topological defects in the nematic phase and tactoids within nematic-isotropic…
Nematic order is the breaking of rotational symmetry in the presence of translational invariance. While originally defined in the context of liquid crystals, the concept of nematic order has arisen in crystalline matter with discrete…
Recent experiments have found a bent-core liquid crystal in which the layer chirality alternates from layer to layer, giving a racemic or "antichiral" material, even though the molecules are uniformly chiral. To explain this effect, we map…
We study experimentally the impact of spherical nanoparticles on the orientational order parameters of a host nematic liquid crystal. We use spherical core-shell quantum dots that are surface functionalized to promote homeotropic anchoring…
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,…
The ferroelectric nematic phase (N$_{\text{F}}$) has quickly become the most studied system in liquid crystal research. In this work, we investigate the origin of such polar structure by studying a compound for which the N$_{\text{F}}$…
Using a version of density-functional theory which combines Onsager approximation and fundamental-measure theory for spatially nonuniform phases, we have studied the phase diagram of freely rotating hard rectangles and hard discorectangles.…