Related papers: Two-dimensional, blue phase tactoids
In a nematic gel, the appearance of nematic order is accompanied by a spontaneous elongation of the gel parallel to the nematic director. If such a gel is made chiral, it has a tendency to form a cholesteric helical texture, in which local…
Research on transport, self-assembly and defect dynamics within confined, flowing liquid crystals requires versatile and computationally efficient mesoscopic algorithms to account for fluctuating nematohydrodynamic interactions. We present…
Dispersions of rodlike colloidal particles exhibit a plethora of liquid crystalline states, including nematic, smectic A, smectic B, and columnar phases. This phase behavior can be explained by presuming the predominance of hard-core volume…
We experimentally investigate the critical behavior of a phase transition between two topologically different turbulent states of electrohydrodynamic convection in nematic liquid crystals. The statistical properties of the observed…
The presence of stable topological defects in a two-dimensional (\textit{d} = 2) liquid crystal model allowing molecular reorientations in three dimensions (\textit{n} = 3) was largely believed to induce defect-mediated…
We use numerical simulations to investigate the hydrodynamic behavior of the interface between nematic (N) and isotropic (I) phases of a confined active liquid crystal. At low activities, a stable interface with constant shape and velocity…
Integer winding disclinations are unstable in a nematic and are removed by an `escape into the third dimension', resulting in a non-singular texture. This process is frustrated in a cholesteric material due to the requirement of maintaining…
Instabilities of fluid-fluid interfaces are ubiquitous in passive soft matter. Adding activity to the interface or either fluid can dramatically change the stability of the interface. Using experiment and theory, we investigate the…
In this paper, the finite volume method is developed to analyze coupled dynamic problems of nonlinear thermoelasticity. The major focus is given to the description of martensitic phase transformations essential in the modelling of shape…
We report on a construction for smectic blue phases, which have quasi-long range smectic translational order as well as three dimensional crystalline order. Our proposed structures fill space by adding layers on top of a minimal surface,…
We present the phase diagram and critical properties of a coupled $XY$-Ising model on a triangular lattice using the mean-field approximation, the Migdal-Kadanoff scheme of renormalization group and Monte-Carlo simulations. The topology of…
The cubic blue phases of liquid crystals are fascinating and technologically promising examples of hierarchically structured soft materials, comprising ordered networks of defect lines (disclinations) within a liquid crystalline matrix. We…
Recent experiments have shown how nematically-ordered tactoid shaped actin droplets can be reorganized and divided by the action of myosin molecular motors. In this paper, we consider how similar morphological changes can potentially be…
Predicting the macroscopic chiral behaviour of cholesteric liquid crystals from the microscopic chirality of the particles is highly non-trivial, even when the chiral interactions are purely entropic in nature. Here we introduce a novel…
We study the organization of topological defects in a system of nematogens confined to the two-dimensional sphere (S^2). We first perform Monte Carlo simulations of a fluid system of hard rods (spherocylinders) living in the tangent plane…
Toroidal nematics are nematic liquid crystals confined within a circular torus and subject to planar degenerate anchoring on the boundary of the torus. They may be droplets floating in an isotropic environment or cavities carved out of a…
The first observation of tungsten disulfide liquid crystalline nanocomposites in dispersions of liquid phase-exfoliated flakes is demonstrated in a range of organic solvents. The nanocomposites demonstrate significant birefringence and…
Chiral crystals offer an unique platform for controlling structural handedness through external stimuli. However, the ability to select between structural enantiomers remains challenging, both theoretically and experimentally. In this work,…
In equilibrium hard-rod fluids, and in effective hard-rod descriptions of anisotropic soft-particle systems, the transition from the isotropic (I) phase to the nematic phase (N) is observed above the rod aspect ratio L/D = 3.70 as predicted…
The phase-field-crystal model for liquid crystals is solved numerically in two spatial dimensions. This model is formulated with three position-dependent order parameters, namely the reduced translational density, the local nematic order…