Related papers: Colloidal spirals in nematic liquid crystals
Aqueous dispersions of exfoliated, bile-salt stabilized single-wall carbon nanotubes exhibit a first order transition to a nematic liquid-crystalline phase. The nematic phase presents itself in the form of micron-sized nematic droplets also…
Colloidal systems offer the ideal conditions to study the nucleation process, both from an experimental viewpoint, due to their relative large size and long time-scales, and from a modeling point of view, due to the tunability of their…
From incompressible flows to electrostatics, harmonic functions can provide solutions to many two-dimensional problems and, similarly, the director field of a planar nematic can be determined using complex analysis. We derive a closed-form…
We stabilize nematic droplets with handles against surface-tension-driven instabilities using a yield-stress material as outer fluid and study the complex nematic textures and defect structures that result from the competition between…
Confining a colloidal crystal within a long narrow channel produced by two parallel walls can be used to impose a meso-scale superstructure of a predominantly mechanical elastic character [Chui et al., EPL 2008, 83, 58004]. When the crystal…
The crystalline solids with lack of orientational ordering of anisotropic particles serve the purpose of studying the disordered systems with many fundamental applications in contemporary research. Despite the orientational disorder,…
Colloidal cuboids have the potential to self-assemble into biaxial liquid crystal phases, which exhibit two independent optical axes. Over the last few decades, several theoretical works predicted the existence of a wide region of the phase…
Achieving and exceeding the diversity of colloidal analogs of chemical elements and molecules as building blocks of matter has been the central goal and challenge of colloidal science ever since Einstein introduced the colloidal atom…
Micrometre sized colloidal particles can be viewed as large atoms with tailorable size, shape and interactions. These building blocks can assemble into extremely rich structures and phases, in which the thermal motions of particles can be…
Complex colloidal cluster morphologies are desirable for the fabrication of advanced materials, such as photonic crystals and meta-materials, and can be formed through evaporation-driven packing. By coupling lattice Boltzmann and discrete…
Topological defects, such as disclination lines in nematic liquid crystals, are fundamental to many physical systems and applications. In this work, we study the behavior of nematic disclinations in thin parallel-plate geometries with…
Rod-shaped colloids with attractive tips can form linear aggregates that may subsequently undergo hierarchical self-assembly into nematic fluids. Inspired by recent modelling efforts on chromonic liquid crystals, composed of discotic…
Skyrmions have attracted rapidly growing interest due to their topological properties and unique aspects for potential novel applications such as data storage and soft robotics. They can also serve as key elements for materials by design,…
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.…
Using Monte Carlo (MC) computer simulations we explore the self-assembly and ordering behavior of a hybrid, soft magnetic system consisting of small magnetic nano-spheres in a liquid-crystalline (LC) matrix. Inspired by recent experiments…
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…
We study stability and distortions of liquid crystal nematic order in a cell with a random heterogeneous substrate. Modeling this system as a bulk xy model with quenched disorder confined to a surface, we find that nematic order is…
Crystalline assemblages of identical sub-units packed together and elastically bent in the form of a torus have been found in the past ten years in a variety of systems of surprisingly different nature, such as viral capsids, self-assembled…
We discuss a method for producing automatic 3D connections at right places between substrates in front to one another. The idea is based on the materialization of disclination lines working as templates. The lines are first created in the…
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,…