Related papers: Active nematic-isotropic interfaces in channels
Active nematics are microscopically driven liquid crystals that exhibit dynamical steady states characterized by the creation and annihilation of topological defects. Motivated by experimental realizations of such systems made of biopolymer…
We study in detail the influence of molecular interactions on the Frank elastic constants of uniaxial nematic liquid crystals composed of molecules of cylindrical symmetry. A brief summary of the status of theoretical development for the…
Using x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy, we studied the dynamics in the nematic phase of a nanorodsuspension. The collective diffusion coefficient in the plane perpendicular to the director varies sharply with the wave vector. Combining…
This article presents a multi-physics methodology for the numerical simulation of physical systems that involve the non-linear interaction of multi-phase reactive fluids and elastoplastic solids, inducing high strain-rates and high…
The dynamics of phase-separated interfaces shape the behavior of both passive and active condensates. While surface tension in equilibrium systems minimizes interface length, non-equilibrium fluxes can destabilize flat or constantly curved…
Liquid crystal droplets are of great interest from physics and applications. Rigorous mathematical analysis is challenging as the problem involves harmonic maps (and in general the Oseen-Frank model), free interfaces and topological defects…
The structure of liquid water in the proximity of an interface can deviate significantly from that of bulk water, with surface-induced structural perturbations typically converging to bulk values at about ~1 nm from the interface. While…
How can a collection of motile cells, each generating contractile nematic stresses in isolation, become an extensile nematic at the tissue-level? Understanding this seemingly contradictory experimental observation, which occurs irrespective…
Using particle-resolved molecular-dynamics simulations, we compute the phase diagram for soft repulsive spherocylinders confined on the surface of a sphere. While crystal (K), smectic (Sm), and isotropic (I) phases exhibit a stability…
Aqueous dispersions of exfoliated, bile-salt stabilized single-wall carbon nanotubes exhibit a first order transition to a nematic liquid-crystalline phase. The nematic phase presents itself in the form of micron-sized nematic droplets also…
Fluctuating hydrodynamics (FH) describes the dynamics of the fluctuations for fluids at mesoscopic scales. Here we use this approach to study the fluctuations of the hydrodynamic variables of a thermotropic nematic liquid crystal (NLC) in a…
We investigate the connection between the transport properties and the thermodynamics of electronic systems with a tendency to form broken-symmetry mesophases evocative of the physics of liquid crystals. Through a hydrodynamic approach to…
When a nematic liquid crystal is confined in a porous medium with strong anchoring conditions, topological defects, called disclinations, are stably formed with numerous possible configurations. Since the energy barriers between them are…
Substrates which are chemically or topographically patterned induce a variety of liquid crystal textures. The response of the liquid crystal to competing surface orientations, typical of patterned substrates, is determined by the anisotropy…
Motile liquid crystal (LC) colloids show peculiar behavior due to the high sensitivity to external stimuli driven by the LC elastic and surface effects. However, few studies focus on harnessing the LC phase transitions to propel colloidal…
In this work, we conducted molecular dynamics simulations to study the fracture mechanism of ice crystals in a bulk phase and at ice-ice interfaces at the atomistic scale. We show that there exists a narrow disordered interfacial layer…
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…
We demonstrate that a first order isotropic-to-nematic phase transition in liquid crystals can be succesfully modeled within the generalized Landau-de Gennes theory by selecting an appropriate combination of elastic constants. The numerical…
Active nematics are out-of-equilibrium systems in which energy injection at the microscale drives emergent collective behaviors, from spontaneous flows to active turbulence. While the dynamics of these systems have been extensively studied,…
Using the Lebwohl-Lasher interaction for reciprocal local alignment, we present a comprehensive phase diagram for a dry, apolar, active nematic system using its stochastic \new{off-lattice} dynamics. \new{The nematic-isotropic transition in…