Related papers: Liquid Crystal Colloids
Molecular chirality leads to a wonderful variety of equilibrium structures, from the simple cholesteric phase to the twist-grain-boundary phases, and it is responsible for interesting and technologically important materials like…
In liquid crystal elastomers, the orientational order of liquid crystals is coupled with elastic distortions of crosslinked polymer networks. Previous theoretical research has described these materials through two different approaches: a…
This paper summarizes a talk presented at the April NATO ASI on Spatiotemporal Chaos in Complex Fluids, in Santa Fe, NM. The paper gives reasons that make complex fluids good material systems for conducting experiments on pattern formation…
We study elastic interactions between colloidal particles and deformation landscapes of undulations in a cholesteric liquid crystal under an electric field applied normal to cholesteric layers. The onset of undulation instability is…
Understanding and controlling the director field configuration, shape, and orientation in nematic and cholesteric liquid crystals is of fundamental importance in several branches of science. Liquid crystalline droplets, also known as…
We investigate quasicrystal-forming soft matter using a two-scale phase field crystal model. At state points near thermodynamic coexistence between bulk quasicrystals and the liquid phase, we find multiple metastable spatially localized…
Colloidal particles are considered ideal building blocks to produce materials with enhanced physical properties. The state-of-the-art techniques for synthesizing these particles provide control over shape, size, and directionality of the…
Quasi-crystals are aperiodic structures that present crystallographic properties which are not compatible with that of a single unit cell. Their revolutionary discovery in a metallic alloy, less than three decades ago, has required a full…
We study colloidal ordering and disordering on two-dimensional periodic substrates where the number of colloids per substrate minima is two or three. The colloids form dimer or trimer states with orientational ordering, referred to as…
We report a molecular dynamics simulation demonstrating that a columnar liquid crystal, commonly formed by disc-shaped molecules, can be formed by identical particles interacting via a spherically symmetric potential. Upon isochoric cooling…
We experimentally and numerically study the structure and dynamics of a mono-disperse packing of spontaneously aligning self-propelled hard disks. The packings are such that their equilibrium counterparts form perfectly ordered hexagonal…
According to classical nucleation theory, a crystal grows from a small nucleus that already bears the symmetry of its end phase - but experiments with colloids now reveal that, from an amorphous precursor, crystallites with different…
A new method is presented for mesoscopic simulations of particle dispersions in liquid crystal solvents. It allows efficient first-principle simulations of the dispersions involving many particles with many-body interactions mediated by the…
Melting of two-dimensional (2D) equilibrium crystals, from superconducting vortex lattices to colloidal structures, is a complex phenomenon characterized by the sequential loss of positional and orientational order. Whereas melting…
Quasicrystals are unique materials characterized by long-range order without periodicity. They are observed in systems such as metallic alloys, soft matter, and particle simulations. Unlike periodic crystals, which are invariant under…
The collective diffusion effects in system of a colloidal particles in a liquid crystal has been proposed. In this article described peculiarity of collective diffusion colloidal particles in a liquid crystal, which can be observe…
Nucleation is an activated process in which the system has to overcome a free energy barrier in order for a first-order phase transition between the metastable and the stable phases to take place. In the liquid-to-solid transition the…
Liquid crystals have proven to provide a versatile experimental and theoretical platform for studying topological objects such as vortices, skyrmions, and hopfions. In parallel, in hard condensed matter physics, the concept of topological…
Liquid crystals consisting of biaxial particles can exhibit a much richer phase behavior than their uniaxial counterparts. Usually, one has to rely on simulation results to understand the phase diagram of these systems, since very few…
Catalytically active colloids maintain non-equilibrium conditions in which they produce and deplete chemicals and hence effectively act as sources and sinks of molecules. While individual colloids that are symmetrically coated do not…