Related papers: Two-dimensional, blue phase tactoids
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 the phase behaviour of a quasi-two dimensional cholesteric liquid crystal shell. We characterise the topological phases arising close to the isotropic-cholesteric transition, and show that they differ in a fundamental way from…
We numerically investigate the phase behavior of thick shells of cholesteric liquid crystals with tangential anchoring at the shell boundary. For achiral liquid crystal, we demonstrate a thickness-dependent transition from a configuration…
We numerically study the dynamics of two-dimensional blue phases in active chiral liquid crystals. We show that introducing contractile activity results in stabilised blue phases, while small extensile activity generates ordered but dynamic…
We study the static properties of cubic blue phases by numerically minimising the three-dimensional, Landau-de Gennes free energy for a cholesteric liquid crystal close to the isotropic-cholesteric phase transition. Thus we are able to…
Chirality is ubiquitous in nature and plays crucial roles in biology, medicine, physics and materials science. Understanding and controlling chirality is therefore an important research challenge with broad implications in fundamental and…
New theoretical approaches have been developed for studying and quantitatively describing the elastic properties of cubic blue phases in cholesteric liquid crystals. Within the framework of the Landau-de Gennes theory, using the simplest…
Motivated by recent experiments, the isotropic-nematic phase transition in chromonic liquid crystals is studied. As temperature decreases, nematic nuclei nucleate, grow, and coalesce, giving rise to tactoid microstructures in an isotropic…
Chiral nematic liquid crystals exhibit both a helical planar ground state with uniform twist and a metastable defect-rich focal conic texture, and can be switched between the two microstructures via application of transient voltage pulses.…
In equilibrium liquid crystals, chirality leads to a variety of spectacular three-dimensional structures, but chiral and achiral phases with the same broken continuous symmetries have identical long-time, large-scale dynamics. In this…
We study the phase behaviour of cholesteric liquid crystal shells with different geometries. We compare the cases of tangential and no anchoring at the surface, focussing on the former case, which leads to a competition between the…
The hydrodynamic stresses created by active particles can destabilise orientational order present in the system. This is manifested, for example, by the appearance of a bend instability in active nematics or in quasi-2-dimensional living…
In this study, we aim to explore the effect of chirality on the phase behavior of active helical particles driven by two-temperature scalar activity. We first calculate the equation of state of soft helical particles of various intrinsic…
This article analyzes modulated phases in liquid crystals, from the long-established cholesteric and blue phases to the recently discovered twist-bend, splay-bend, and splay nematic phases, as well as the twist-grain-boundary (TGB) and…
In soft matter, the phase of nematic liquid crystals can be made from anisotropic molecules in single component materials, or as a suspension of mesoscopic nematogens. The later offers more versatility in the experimental design of complex…
Liquid crystals in two dimensions undergo a first-order isotropic-to-quasi-nematic transition, provided the particle interactions are sufficiently ``sharp and narrow''. This implies phase coexistence between isotropic and quasi-nematic…
Cholesteric liquid crystals exhibit great morphological richness of static metastable states. Understanding the transitions between such states is key for the development of switchable devices. We show, using a quasi-one-dimensional model,…
We investigate numerically the behaviour of a phase-separating mixture of a blue phase I liquid crystal with an isotropic fluid. The resulting morphology is primarily controlled by an inverse capillary number, $\chi$, setting the balance…
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…
Nematic tactoids are spindle-shaped droplets of a nematic phase nucleated in the co-existing isotropic phase. According to equilibrium theory, their internal structure and shape are controlled by a balance between the elastic deformation of…