Related papers: Splay nematic phase
Phase sequences of the biaxial nematic liquid crystal in the interior of the essential triangle are studied with Wang Landau sampling. The evidence points to the existence of an intermediate unixial phase with low biaxiality in the…
A nematic liquid crystal in contact with a grating surface possessing an alternating stripe pattern of locally homeotropic and planar anchoring is studied within the Frank--Oseen model. The combination of both chemical and geometrical…
The optical birefringence of rod-like nematogens (7CB, 8CB), imbibed in parallel silica channels with 10 nm diameter and 300 micrometer length, is measured and compared to the thermotropic bulk behavior. The orientational order of the…
We studied equilibrium systems composed of wedge-shaped monodisperse molecules using hard-particle Monte Carlo simulations. Each model molecule was made up of six colinear tangent spheres with linearly decreasing diameters. Thus, the shape…
A simple model is proposed for nematogenic molecules that favor perpendicular orientations as well as parallel ones. (Charged rods, for example, show this antagonistic tendency.) When a small disorienting field is applied along $z$, a low…
Liquid crystals consisting of biaxial particles can exhibit a much richer phase behavior than their uniaxial counterparts. Usually, one has to rely on simulation results to understand the phase diagram of these systems, since very few…
Anomalous nematic states, recently discovered in ultraclean two-dimensional electron gas, emerge from quantum Hall stripe phases upon further cooling. These states are hallmarked by a local minimum (maximum) in the hard (easy) longitudinal…
The twist-bend nematic (Ntb) phase is a recent addition to the nematic (N) phases of liquid crystals (LCs). A net polar order in the Ntb phase under an external electric field was predicted in several recent theoretical studies but yet to…
We study an interacting electronic system exhibiting a spin nematic instability. Using a phenomenological form for the spin fluctuation spectrum near the spin-density-wave (SDW) phase, we compute the spin nematic susceptibility in energy…
Starting from a three-dimensional description of an active nematic layer, we employ an asymptotic theory to derive a series of low-dimensional continuum models that capture the coupled dynamics of flat and curved films, including variations…
Dielectric spectroscopy of a twist bend nematic phase of an achiral bent core liquid crystalline compound under DC bias is used to investigate its response to electric field. Two collective relaxation processes are revealed, these are…
We study the kinetics of the nematic-isotropic transition in a two-dimensional liquid crystal by using a lattice Boltzmann scheme that couples the tensor order parameter and the flow consistently. Unlike in previous studies, we find the…
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 possible symmetries of the biaxial nematic phase are examined against the implications of the presently available experimental results. Contrary to the widespread notion that biaxial nematics have orthorhombic symmetry, our study shows…
Continuum models of active nematic gels have proved successful to describe a number of biological systems consisting of a population of rodlike motile subunits in a fluid environment. However, in order to get a thorough understanding of the…
We observe novel positional control of a colloidal particle in microchannel flow of a nematic liquid crystal. Lattice Boltzmann simulations show multiple equilibrium particle positions, the existence and position of which are tunable using…
Recent numerical simulations of hard helical particle systems unveiled the existence of a novel chiral nematic phase, termed screw-like, characterised by the helical organization of the particle C$_2$ symmetry axes round the nematic…
Recent experiments report that the long looked for thermotropic biaxial nematic phase has been finally detected in some thermotropic liquid crystalline systems. Inspired by these experimental observations we concentrate on some elementary…
Increasing evidence suggests that active matter exhibits instances of mixed symmetry that cannot be fully described by either polar or nematic formalism. Here, we introduce a minimal model that integrates self-propulsion into the active…
Topological defects are distinctive signatures of liquid crystals. They profoundly affect the viscoelastic behavior of the fluid by constraining the orientational structure in a way that inevitably requires global changes not achievable…