Related papers: Geometric frustration and compatibility conditions…
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 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…
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…
Geometric frustration has long been a subject of enduring interest in condensed matter physics. While geometric frustration traditionally focuses on magnetic systems, little attention is paid to the "frustrated superconductivity" which…
We propose a general formalism to characterize orientational frustration of smectic liquid crystals in confinement by interpreting the emerging networks of grain boundaries as objects with a topological charge. In a formal idealization,…
In a bearing state, touching spheres (disks in two dimensions) roll on each other without slip. Here we frustrate a system of touching spheres by imposing two different bearing states on opposite sides and search for the configurations of…
In many situations bacteria move in complex environments, as for example in soils, oceans or the human gut-track microbiome. In these natural environments, carrier fluids such as mucus or reproductive fluids show complex structure…
Ground-state and finite-temperature properties of the mixed spin-1/2 and spin-S Ising-Heisenberg diamond chains are examined within an exact analytical approach based on the generalized decoration-iteration map. A particular emphasis is…
An exact description is provided of an almost spherical fluid vesicle with a fixed area and a fixed enclosed volume locally deformed by external normal forces bringing two nearby points on the surface together symmetrically. The conformal…
Specific features of two-dimensional nematodynamics give rise to shortfalls of the tensor representation of the nematic order parameter commonly used in computations, especially in theory of active matter. The alternative representation in…
In this experimental and theoretical study, we examine the equilibrium shapes of quasitwo-dimensional twist-bend nematic (Ntb) drops formed within a planarly aligned nematic layer of the liquid crystal CB7CB. Initially, at the setting point…
We investigate the thermodynamic, structural, and dynamic behavior of a three-dimensional coarse-grained ramp-shoulder fluid derived from effective interactions between polymer-grafted nanoparticles. The interaction combines a softened…
Quantum systems with geometrical frustration remain an outstanding challenge for numerical simulations due to the infamous numerical sign problem. Here, we overcome this obstruction via complex path integration in a geometrically frustrated…
We introduce a Phase Field Crystal (PFC) model for particles with n-fold rotational symmetry in two dimensions. Our approach is based on a free energy functional that depends on the reduced one-particle density, the strength of the…
Liquid crystal elastomers represent a novel class of programmable shape-transforming materials whose shape change trajectory is encoded in the material's nematic director field. Using three-dimensional nonlinear finite element…
We present a numerical study on geometric percolation in liquid dispersions of hard slender colloidal particles subjected to an external orienting field. In the formulation and liquid-state processing of nanocomposite materials, the…
We study the phase diagram of a system of spherical particles interacting in three dimensions through a potential consisting of a strict hard core plus a linear repulsive shoulder at larger distances. The phase diagram (obtained…
Recent theoretical research has developed a general framework to understand director deformations and modulated phases in nematic liquid crystals. In this framework, there are four fundamental director deformation modes: twist, bend, splay,…
We test the performance of a recently proposed fundamental measure density functional of aligned hard cylinders by calculating the phase diagram of a monodisperse fluid of these particles. We consider all possible liquid crystalline…
Motivated by recent experiments on BaCuSi2O6, we investigate magnetic excitations and quantum phase transitions of layered dimer magnets with inter-layer frustration. We consider two scenarios, (A) a lattice with one dimer per unit cell and…