Related papers: Surface alignment disorder and pseudo-Casimir forc…
Rod-like objects at high packing fractions can form smectic phases, where the rods break rotational and translational symmetry by forming lamellae. Smectic defects thereby include both discontinuities in the rod orientational order…
We have investigated the response of amorphous silicon (a-Si), in particular crystallization, to external mechanical shear deformations using classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and the empirical Environment Dependent Inter-atomic…
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 spinodal phase separation in unstable thin liquid films on chemically disordered substrates via simulations of the thin-film equation. The disorder is characterized by immobile patches of varying size and Hamaker constant. The…
For the first time we present analytical results for the contribution of electromagnetic fluctuations into thermodynamic properties of modulated systems, like cholesteric or smectic liquid crystalline films. In the case of small dielectric…
Free interfaces of liquid crystals tend to minimise both capillarity and anchoring forces. Here we study nematic films in planar and radial geometries with antagonistic anchoring boundary conditions and one deformable interface. Assuming a…
High-entropy oxide (HEO) thin films uniquely superimpose exceptional chemical disorder with exceptional crystalline quality and coherence - an intersection we term anomalous crystallinity that arises from coupled structural, chemical, and…
Systems described by an O(n) symmetrical $\phi^4$ Hamiltonian are considered in a $d$-dimensional film geometry at their bulk critical points. A detailed renormalization-group (RG) study of the critical Casimir forces induced between the…
We examine the influence of bidirectional anchoring on the unwinding of a planar cholesteric liquid crystal induced by the application of a magnetic field. We consider a liquid crystal layer confined between two plates with the helical axis…
Optical lattice experiments which probe the effect of disorder on superfluidity often use a speckle pattern for generating the disorder. Such speckle disorder is spatially correlated. While fermionic superfluidity in the presence of…
Casimir forces, related to London-van der Waals forces, arise if the spectrum of electromagnetic fluctuations is restricted by boundaries. There is great interest both from fundamental science and technical applications to control these…
When massless excitations are limited or modified by the presence of material bodies one observes a force acting between them generally called Casimir force. Such excitations are present in any fluid system close to its true bulk critical…
Experiments have investigated shape changes of polymer films induced by asymmetric swelling by a chemical vapor. Inspired by recent work on the shaping of elastic sheets by non-Euclidean metrics [Y. Klein, E. Efrati, and E. Sharon, Science…
In the current work we present the complete results for the measurement of normal Casimir force between shallow and smooth sinusoidally corrugated gold coated sphere and a plate at various angles between the corrugations using an atomic…
We report combined optical birefringence and neutron scattering measurements on the liquid crystal 12CB nanoconfined in mesoporous silicon layers. This liquid crystal exhibits strong nematic-smectic coupling responsible for a discontinuous…
We study jammed near-crystalline materials composed of frictionless spheres in three dimensions. We analyze the fluctuations in positions and forces produced by small polydispersity in particle sizes. We generalize a recently developed…
We study the distribution of multivalent counterions next to a dielectric slab, bearing a quenched, random distribution of charges on one of its solution interfaces, with a given mean and variance, both in the absence and in the presence of…
Non-equilibrium systems are known to exhibit long-ranged correlations due to conservation of quantities like density or momentum. This, in turn, leads to long-ranged fluctuation-induced (Casimir) forces, predicted to arise in a variety of…
Motivated by a number of recent experimental and computational studies of the dynamics of fluids plunged in quenched-disordered external fields, we report on a theoretical investigation of this topic within the framework of the…
We investigate the force acting between two parallel plates held at different temperatures. The force reproduces, as limiting cases, the well known Casimir-Lifshitz surface-surface force at thermal equilibrium and the surface-atom force out…