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The role of applied fields on the structure of liquid crystals confined to shell geometries has been studied in past theoretical work, providing strategies to produce liquid crystal shells with controlled defect structure or valence.…
The positioning of a bubble inside a many fermion system does not affect the volume, surface or curvature terms in the liquid drop expansion of the total energy. Besides possible Coulomb effects, the only other contribution to the ground…
Electrophoresis is a motion of charged dispersed particles relative to a fluid in a uniform electric field. The effect is widely used to separate macromolecules, to assemble colloidal structures, to transport particles in nano- and…
Engineering synthetic materials that mimic the remarkable complexity of living organisms is a fundamental challenge in science and technology. We study the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematicfilm of microtubules and…
Can the presence of molecular-tilt order significantly affect the shapes of lipid bilayer membranes, particularly membrane shapes with narrow necks? Motivated by the propensity for tilt order and the common occurrence of narrow necks in the…
We design a nematic collider for controlled out-of-equilibrium anisotropic aggregation of spherical colloidal particles. The nematic surrounding imparts dipolar interactions among the spheres. A bidirectional backflow of the nematic liquid…
Modeling membrane interactions with arbitrarily shaped colloidal particles, such as environmental micro- and nanoplastics, at the cell scale remains particularly challenging, owing to the complexity of particle geometries and the need to…
In this paper, the two-dimensional pure bending of a hyperelastic substrate coated by a nematic liquid crystal elastomer (abbreviated as NLCE) is studied within the framework of nonlinear elasticity. The governing system, arising from the…
When captured by a flat nematic-isotropic interface, colloidal particles can be dragged by it. As a result spatially periodic structures may appear, with the period depending on a particle mass, size, and interface…
In the context of finite elasticity, we propose plate models describing the spontaneous bending of nematic elastomer thin films due to variations along the thickness of the nematic order parameters. Reduced energy functionals are deduced…
A kinetic model for the nucleation mechanism of protein folding is proposed. A protein is modeled as a heteropolymer consisting of hydrophobic and hydrophilic beads with equal constant bond lengths and bond angles. The total energy of the…
Active forces occurring within cells can drive crucial biological processes that involve spontaneous organization and shape change, such as cell division. Motivated by recent in vitro experiments of nematic droplets of cytoskeletal…
Bistable shells can reversibly change between two stable configurations with very little energetic input. Understanding what governs the shape and snap-through criteria of these structures is crucial for designing devices that utilize…
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,…
For particles confined to two dimensions, any curvature of the surface affects the structural, kinetic and thermodynamic properties of the system. If the curvature is non-uniform, an even richer range of behaviours can emerge. Using a…
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 theoretically investigate under what conditions the director field in a spindle-shaped nematic droplet or tactoid obtains a twisted, parity-broken structure. By minimizing the sum of the bulk elastic and surface energies, we show that a…
We study the impact of nematic alignment on scalar active matter in the disordered phase. We show that nematic torques control the emergent physics of particles interacting via pairwise forces and can either induce or prevent phase…
Dynamics of small particles, both living such as swimming bacteria and inanimate, such as colloidal spheres, has fascinated scientists for centuries. If one could learn how to control and streamline their chaotic motion, that would open…
Tactoids are spindle shaped-droplets of a uniaxial nematic phase suspended in the co-existing isotropic phase. They are found in dispersions of a wide variety of elongated colloidal particles, including actin, fd virus, carbon nanotubes,…