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Polar nematic liquid crystals are new classes of condensed-matter states where the inversion symmetry common to the traditional apolar nematics is broken. Establishing theoretical descriptions for the novel phase states is an urgent task.…
When liquid-crystalline elastomers pass through the isotropic-nematic transition, the orientational order parameter and the elastic strain vary rapidly but smoothly, without the expected first-order discontinuity. This broadening of the…
A state of matter in which molecules show a long-range orientational order and no positional order is called a nematic liquid crystal. The best known and most widely used (for example, in modern displays) is the uniaxial nematic, with the…
We propose a concept of non-collinear spin current, whose spin polarization varies in space even in non-magnetic crystals. While it is commonly assumed that the spin polarization of the spin Hall current is uniform, asymmetric local crystal…
While studies of active nematics in two dimensions have shed light on various aspects of the flow regimes and topology of active matter, three-dimensional properties of topological defects and chaotic flows remain unexplored. By confining a…
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…
Mono-layers of stearic and behenic acids deposited with the Langmuir-Blodgett technique, were used as aligning films in nematic liquid crystal cells. During the filling process the liquid crystal adopts a deformed quasi-planar alignment…
Chiral photonics provides powerful routes for controlling the light handedness, yet nonlinear chiral responses are typically associated with intricate three-dimensional systems. Here, we demonstrate that strong nonlinear chirality can…
The textures associated with a point defect centered in a circular domain of a thin film with XY-like ordering have been analyzed. The family of equilibrium textures, both stable and metastable, can be classified by a new radial topological…
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 study stability and distortions of liquid crystal nematic order in a cell with a random heterogeneous substrate. Modeling this system as a bulk xy model with quenched disorder confined to a surface, we find that nematic order is…
Smectic liquid crystals vividly illustrate the subtle interplay of broken translational and orientational symmetries, by exhibiting defect structures forming geometrically perfect confocal ellipses and hyperbolas. Here, we develop and…
Nanoscale topologically non-trivial magnetization configurations generate significant interest due to both the fundamental properties of their knotted structures and their potential applications in ultra-efficient computing devices. While…
Chiral crystals, like chiral molecules, cannot be superimposed onto their mirror images -- a fundamental property that has been linked to interesting physical behavior and exploited in functional devices. Among the simplest inorganic…
Achieving control and tunability of lyotropic materials has been a long-standing goal of liquid crystal research. Here we show that the elasticity of a liquid crystal system consisting of a dense suspension of semiflexible biopolymers can…
At the A to C transition, smectic elastomers have recently been observed to undergo $\sim$35% spontaneous shear strains. We first explicitly describe how strains of up to twice this value could be mechanically or electrically induced in…
In the paper [Eur. J. of Appl. Math. \textbf{20}, (2009) 269--287] by da Costa et al. the twist-Fr\'eedericksz transition in a nematic liquid crystal one-dimensional cell of lenght $L$ was studied imposing an antisymmetric net twist…
Three-dimensional (3D) magnetic nanostructures offer unprecedented opportunities for engineering emergent spin textures, but controlling their configuration remains a central challenge. Here we show that conformally coated Ni Nanotubes…
We use a custom shear cell coupled to an optical microscope to investigate at the particle level the yielding transition in concentrated emulsions subjected to an oscillatory shear deformation. By performing experiments lasting thousands of…
We study light transmission through a homeotropically oriented nematic liquid crystal cell and solve self-consistently a nonlinear equation for the nematic director coupled to Maxwell's equations. We demonstrate that above a certain…