Related papers: Chiral liquid crystal colloids
Colloids self-assemble into various organized superstructures determined by particle interactions. There is a tremendous progress in both the scientific understanding and applications of self-assemblies of single-type identical particles.…
One of the central experimental efforts in nematic colloids research aims to explore how the interplay between the geometry of particles along with the accompanying nematic director deformations and defects around them can provide a means…
Chiral nematic or cholesteric liquid crystals (LCs) are mesophases with long-ranged orientational order featuring a quasi-layered periodicity imparted by a helical configuration but lacking positional order. Doping molecular cholesteric LCs…
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…
The geometric shape, symmetry, and topology of colloidal particles often allow for controlling colloidal phase behavior and physical properties of these soft matter systems. In liquid crystalline dispersions, colloidal particles with low…
Using laser tweezers and fluorescence confocal polarizing microscopy, we study colloidal interactions of solid microspheres in the nematic bulk caused by elastic distortions around the particles with strong tangential surface anchoring. The…
The progress of realizing colloidal structures mimicking natural forms of organization in condensed matter is inherently limited by the availability of suitable colloidal building blocks. To enable new forms of crystalline and…
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…
Self-assembly of nanoparticles can enable composites with pre-designed properties but remains challenged by reproducing structural diversity of atomic and molecular crystals. We combine anisotropic elastic and weakly screened electrostatic…
Self-assembly of colloidal particles due to elastic interactions in nematic liquid crystals promises tunable composite materials and can be guided by exploiting surface functionalization, geometric shape and topology, though these means of…
Liquid crystal mesophases of achiral molecules are normally achiral, yet in a few materials they spontaneously segregate and form right- and left-handed chiral domains. One mechanism that drives chiral segregation is molecular shape…
Spherical microparticles dispersed in nematic liquid crystals have been extensively investigated in the past years. Here, we report experimental studies on the elastic deformation, colloidal interaction and self-assembly of hematite…
Curved particles have been shown to stabilize a range of states with unique order in dense suspensions of colloidal bent core liquid crystals. The shape of the colloidal rods encourages the formation of curved director fields. However,…
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,…
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…
We demonstrate a variety of ordered patterns, including hexagonal structures and chains, formed by colloidal particles (droplets) at the free surface of a nematic liquid crystal (LC). The surface placement introduces a new type of particle…
The theory of elastic interaction of micron size axially symmetric colloidal particles immersed into confined nematic liquid crystal has been proposed. General formulas are obtained for the self energy of one colloidal particle and…
Control of physical behaviors of nematic colloids and colloidal crystals has been demonstrated by tuning particle shape, topology, chirality and surface charging. However, the capability of altering physical behaviors of such soft matter…
The growing interest in the non-equilibrium assembly of colloidal particles in active liquids is driven by the motivation to create novel structures endowed with tunable properties unattainable within the confines of equilibrium systems.…
Ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals are formed by achiral molecules with large dipole moments. Its three-dimensional orientational order is universally described as unidirectionally polar. We demonstrate that the ground state of…