Related papers: Nematic twist--bend phase in an external field
In magnetic insulators, the sense of rotation of the magnetization is associated with novel phases of matter and exotic transport phenomena. Aimed to find new sources of chiral magnetism rooted in intrinsic fields and geometry, twisted…
Nematic liquid crystals possess three different phases: isotropic, uniaxial, and biaxial. The ground state of most nematics is either isotropic or uniaxial, depending on the external temperature. Nevertheless, biaxial domains have been…
In two dimensional nematics, topological defects are point like singularities with both a charge and a phase. We study topological defects within curved nematic textures on the surface of a cylinder. This allows us to isolate the effect of…
We study geometrically-controlled twist transitions of a nematic confined between a sinusoidal grating and a flat substrate. In these cells the transition to the twisted state is driven by surface effects. We have identified the mechanisms…
Recent experimental evidences point to rotation symmetry breaking superconductivity in doped Bi$_2$Se$_3$, where the relevant order parameter belongs to a two-component odd-parity representation $E_u$ of the crystal point group. The $E_u$…
Periodic structures of phases with orientational order of molecules, but homogenous electron density distribution: a short pitch cholesteric, blue phase and twist-bend nematic phase, were probed by a resonant soft x-ray scattering (RSoXS)…
We investigate the dynamics of a charged particle confined to move on a toroidal helix while being driven by an external time-dependent electric field. The underlying phase space is analyzed for linearly and circularly polarized fields. For…
The skyrmion crystal is a periodic array of a swirling topological spin texture. Since it is regarded as an interference pattern by multiple helical spin density waves, the texture changes with the relative phases among the constituent…
The extended Frank elastic energy density is used to investigate the existence of a stable periodically modulate structure that appears as a ground state exhibiting a twist-bend molecular arrangement. For an unbounded sample, we show that…
We study elasticity of spontaneously orientationally-ordered amorphous solids, characterized by a vanishing transverse shear modulus, as realized for example by nematic elastomers and gels. We show that local heterogeneities and elastic…
We investigate chiral superconductivity which occurs in the electronic nematic state. A vortex state in a $c$-axis magnetic field is studied on the basis of the two-component Ginzburg-Landau model for nematic-chiral superconductors. It is…
Toroidal nematics are droplets of nematic liquid crystals in the form of a circular torus. When the nematic director is subject to planar degenerate boundary conditions, the bend-only director field with vector lines along the parallels of…
Recently discovered helical polar fluid adopts a spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking (CSB) driven by polarization escape and conformational chirality. Ferroelectric nematic and smectic phases are intrinsically chiral in the ground state…
We present a general theory of liquid crystals under inhomogeneous electric field in a Ginzburg-Landau scheme. The molecular orientation can be deformed by electric field when the dielectric tensor is orientation-dependent. We then…
Metastable phases may be spontaneously formed from other metastable phases through nucleation. Here we demonstrate the spontaneous formation of a metastable phase from an unstable equilibrium by spinodal decomposition, which leads to a…
We obtain the ground-state phase diagram of two spin chains consisting in a set two-level systems asymmetrically coupled to an XX chain through a chiral interaction. The interaction is parametrized by its magnitude and an angle defined by…
The mechanics of a flexible membrane decorated with a nematic liquid-crystal texture is considered in a variational framework. The variations on the splay, twist and the bend energy of the nematics are obtained from the local deformations…
Based on a mesoscopic theory we investigate the non-equilibrium dynamics of a sheared nematic liquid, with the control parameter being the shear stress $\sigma_{\mathrm{xy}}$ (rather than the usual shear rate, $\dot\gamma$). To this end we…
Anisotropic rod-like particles form liquid crystalline phases with varying degrees of orientational and translational order. When confined geometrically, these phases can give rise to topological defects, which can be selected and…
Nonlinear transport phenomena induced by the chiral anomaly are explored within a 4D field theory defined holographically as $U(1)_V\times U(1)_A$ Maxwell-Chern-Simons theory in Schwarzschild-$AdS_5$. First, in presence of external…