Related papers: Heliconical smectic phases formed by achiral molec…
Liquid crystalline phases of matter permeate nature and technology, with examples ranging from cell membranes to liquid-crystal displays. Remarkably, electronic liquid crystal phases can exist in two-dimensional electron systems (2DES) at…
The yet virtually unexplored class of soft colloidal rods with small aspect ratio is investigated and shown to exhibit a very rich phase and dynamic behavior, spanning from liquid to nearly melt state. Instead of nematic order, these short…
X-ray scattering and polarized microscopic studies of the structure and order parameters in the nematic (N) and heliconical, or the twist-bend nematic (Ntb), phase have been performed as a function of temperature. The nematic orientational…
It is shown that mechanical twinning in smectic crystals is possible. The structure of the boundary of twins for a small disorientation of crystallites is determined. The periodic twin structure, which should appear at the tension of the…
The order parameters for the phenomenological description of the smectic-{\it A} to smectic-{\it C} phase transition are formulated on the basis of molecular symmetry and structure. It is shown that, unless the long molecular axis is an…
Liquid crystal materials exhibiting up to three nematic phases are reported. Dielectric response measurements show that while the lower temperature nematic phase has ferroelectric order and the highest temperature nematic phase is apolar,…
What kind of one-dimensional modulated nematic structures (ODMNS) can form nonchiral and chiral bent-core and dimeric materials? Here, using Landau-deGennes theory of nematics, extended to account for molecular steric polarization, we study…
We report on a comprehensive computer simulation study of the liquid-crystal phase behaviour of purely repulsive, semi-flexible rod-like particles. For the four aspect ratios we consider, the particles form five distinct phases depending on…
A careful study of thermodynamic and transport properties of a high quality single crystal of MnSi at ambient pressure suggests that its transition to a helical magnetic state near 29 K is weakly first order. The heat capacity, temperature…
The thermodynamical stability of DNA minicircles is investigated by means of path integral techniques. Hydrogen bonds between base pairs on complementary strands can be broken by thermal fluctuations and temporary fluctuational openings…
Molecular arrangement in the chiral smectic phases of the glassforming (S)-4'-(1-methylheptylcarbonyl)biphenyl-4-yl 4-[7-(2,2,3,3,4,4,4-heptafluorobutoxy) heptyl-1-oxy]benzoate is investigated by X-ray diffraction. An increased correlation…
We consider the shear flow of well-aligned one-component smectic phases, such as thermotropic smectics and lamellar diblock copolymers, below the critical region. We show that, as a result of thermal fluctuations of the layers, parallel…
We numerically investigate two-dimensional systems of hard rectangles at constant pressure through extensive hard-particle Monte Carlo simulations. We determine the complete phase diagram as a function of packing fraction and aspect ratio,…
We predict the existence of a new defect-lattice phase near the nematic - smectic-C (NC) transition. This tilt- analogue of the blue phase is a lattice of double-tilt cylinders. We discuss the structure and stability of the cone phase. We…
Precision measurements of the magnetization and ac susceptibility of Cu$_2$0SeO$_3$ are reported for magnetic fields along different crystallographic directions, focussing on the border between the conical and the field-polarized state for…
A statistical method is developed to estimate the maximum amplitude of the base pair fluctuations in a three dimensional mesoscopic model for nucleic acids. The base pair thermal vibrations around the helix diameter are viewed as a Brownian…
We study the chiral symmetry breaking and metastability of confined nematic lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal (LCLC) with and without chiral dopants. The isotropic-nematic coexistence phase of the LCLC renders two confining geometries:…
Spin waves are the low-energy excitations of magnetically ordered materials. They are key elements in the stability analysis of the ordered phase and have a wealth of technological applications. Recently, we showed that spin waves of a…
We show that a simple two dimensional model of spin crossover materials gives rise to spin-state smectic phases where the pattern of high-spin (HS) and low-spin (LS) metal centers spontaneously breaks rotational symmetry and translational…
High-entropy intermetallic compounds (HEICs) were fabricated by mechanical alloying and spark plasma sintering to fill a knowledge gap between the traditional high-entropy alloys (HEAs) and emerging high-entropy ceramics (HECs). Notably,…