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Under an electric field, chiral smectic liquid crystals transit usually to the unwound SmC* phase where the helical structure is completely unrolled. Sometimes the sample transits initially towards an intermediate polar state before the…
The multidimensional energy surface of a cholesteric liquid crystal in a planar cell is investigated as a function of spherical coordinates determining the director orientation. Minima on the energy surface correspond to the stable states…
We propose a continuum tensorial model for chiral smectic C (SmC$^*$) liquid crystals using a tensor-valued order parameter $\mathbf{Q}$ to describe orientational order and a real-valued order parameter $\delta\rho$ to capture layer…
The thermodynamic stability of emulsions of liquid crystal in water (glycerol) matrices is demonstrated for a wide range of materials and concentrations. Coalescence is prevented by an energy barrier for a topological ring defect formation…
Recently, a new class of smectic liquid crystal phases (SmCP phases) characterized by the spontaneous formation of macroscopic chiral domains from achiral bent-core molecules has been discovered. We have carried out Monte Carlo simulations…
We consider helical configurations of a cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) sandwiched between two substrates with homogeneous director orientation favored at both confining plates. We study the CLC twist wavenumber $q$ characterizing the…
We present here a numerical study of a lattice model of a chiral liquid. The low symmetry of the favoured local structure depresses the freezing point to reveal an exotic liquid-liquid transition characterised by the appearance of an…
Structural studies by synchrotron x-ray diffraction on two main-chain smectic-C elastomers reveal the presence of two different relaxation mechanisms in these systems at low and high strains. At low strains, the smectic layers are…
We study smectic-liquid-crystal order in a cell with a heterogeneous substrate imposing surface random positional and orientational pinnings. Proposing a minimal random elastic model, we demonstrate that, for a thick cell, the smectic state…
A dynamic light scattering study of director-layer fluctuations in the antiferroelectric smectic-ZA phase of the ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal DIO is reported. The dynamics are consistent with the distinctive feature of the ZA phase…
Morphological instability of the solid-liquid interface occuring in a crystal growing from an undercooled thin liquid being bounded on one side by a free surface and flowing down inclined plane is investigated by a linear stability analysis…
We present the results of molecular dynamics simulations of the Gay-Berne model of liquid crystals, supercooled from the nematic phase. We find a glass transition to a metastable phase with nematic order and frozen translational and…
Motivated by a realization of imbalanced Feshbach-resonant atomic Fermi gases, we formulate a low-energy theory of the Fulde-Ferrell and the Larkin-Ovchinnikov (LO) states and use it to analyze fluctuations, stability, and phase transitions…
Smectic liquid crystals are materials formed by stacking deformable, fluid layers. Though smectics prefer to have flat, uniformly-spaced layers, boundary conditions can impose curvature on the layers. Since the layer spacing and curvature…
Due to the intertwining between electronic nematic and elastic degrees of freedom, lattice defects and structural inhomogeneities commonly found in crystals can have a significant impact on the electronic properties of nematic materials.…
In the absence of disorder, electrons can display glassy behavior through supercooling the liquid state, avoiding the solidification into a charge ordered state. Such supercooled electron liquids are experimentally found in organic…
When a multicomponent liquid composed of particles with random interactions is slowly cooled below the freezing temperature, the fluid reorganises in order to increase (decrease) the number of strong (weak) attractive interactions and…
We show how deeply quenching a liquid to temperatures where it is linearly unstable and the crystal is the equilibrium phase often produces crystalline structures with defects and disorder. As the solid phase advances into the liquid phase,…
We investigate experimentally and numerically the defect configurations emerging when a cholesteric liquid crystal is confined to a spherical shell. We uncover a rich scenario of defect configurations, some of them non-existent in nematic…
Crystals with low latent heat are predicted to melt from an entropically stabilized body-centered cubic symmetry. At this weakly first-order transition, strongly correlated fluctuations are expected to emerge, which could change the nature…