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Abundant in nature, colloids also find increasingly important applications in science and technology, ranging from direct probing of kinetics in crystals and glasses to fabrication of third-generation quantum-dot solar cells. Because…

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…

Orientational and positional ordering properties of liquid crystal monolayers are examined by means of Fundamental-Measure Density Functional Theory. Particles forming the monolayer are modeled as hard parallelepipeds of square section of…

Local rearrangements are the elements of plastic deformation in an amorphous solid. In oscillatory shear, they can switch reversibly between two distinct configurations. While these repeating relaxations are typically considered in the…

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…

The assembly of colloids in nematic liquid crystals via topological defects has been extensively studied for spherical particles, and investigations of other colloid shapes have revealed a wide array of new assembly behaviors. We show,…

How epithelial cells coordinate their polarity to form functional tissues is an open question in cell biology. Here, we characterize a unique type of polarity found in liver tissue, nematic cell polarity, which is different from vectorial…

We extend the concept of natural orbitals as an optimized single-particle basis for ab initio nuclear many-body calculations to hypernuclei and show that their superior properties, in particular accelerated convergence and independence of…

The interplay between order and geometry in soft condensed matter systems is an active field with many striking results and even more open problems. Ordered structures on curved surfaces appear in multi-electron helium bubbles, viral and…

Colloidal particles dispersed in a partially ordered medium, such as a liquid crystal (LC) phase, disturb its alignment and are subject to elastic forces. These forces are long-ranged, anisotropic and tunable through temperature or external…

We predict theoretically the existence of a class of colloidal structures in nematic liquid crystal (NLC) cells, which are induced by surface patterns on the plates of the cell (like cells with UV-irradiated polyimide surfaces using micron…

We study the phase behaviour of cholesteric liquid crystal shells with different geometries. We compare the cases of tangential and no anchoring at the surface, focussing on the former case, which leads to a competition between the…

Building on the striking similarity between the structure of the spindle during mitosis in living cells and nematic textures in confined liquid crystals, we use a continuum model of two-dimensional nematic liquid crystal droplets, to…

Electrophoresis is the motion of particles relative to a surrounding fluid driven by a uniform electric field. In conventional electrophoresis, the electrophoretic velocity grows linearly with the applied field. Nonlinear effects with a…

We use geometric methods of equivariant dynamical systems to address a long-standing open problem in the theory of nematic liquid crystals, namely a proof of the existence and asymptotic stability of kayaking periodic orbits for which the…

Motivated to understand the behavior of biological filaments interacting with membranes of various types, we study a theoretical model for the shape and thermodynamics of intrinsically-helical filaments bound to curved membranes. We show…

Fluid interfaces, such as soap films, liquid droplets or lipid membranes, are known to give rise to several special geometries, whose complexity and beauty continue to fascinate us, as observers of the natural world, and challenge us as…

Morphodynamic equations governing the behaviour of active nematic fluids on deformable curved surfaces are constructed in the large deformation limit. Emphasis is placed on the formulation of objective rates that account for normal…

Nematic colloids exhibit a large diversity of topological defects and structures induced by colloidal particles in the orientationally ordered liquid crystal host fluids. These defects and field configurations define elastic interactions…

An intermediate nematic phase is proposed for the interpretation of recent experimental results on phase biaxiality in bent-core nematics. The phase is macroscopically uniaxial but consists of microscopic biaxial, and possibly polar,…