Related papers: Liquid Crystal Distortions Revealed by an Octupola…
The motion of topological defects is an important feature of the dynamics of all liquid crystals, and is especially conspicuous in active liquid crystals. Understanding defect motion is a challenging theoretical problem, because the…
The appealing connection between non-Euclidean geometries and defects in solids is brought forth in this article. Drawing a correspondence between the nature of a defect and a specific geometric property of the material space not only…
Liquids generally become more ordered upon cooling. However, it has been a long-standing debate on whether such structural ordering in liquid water takes place continuously or discontinuosly: continuum vs. mixture models. Here, by computer…
The twist-bend nematic phase, $N_{\rm TB}$, may be viewed as a heliconical molecular arrangement in which the director $\bf n$ precesses uniformly about an extra director field, $\bf t$. It corresponds to a nematic ground state exhibiting…
While in principle, finite temperature density functional theory (ftDFT) should be a powerful tool for the study of crystallization, in practice this has not so far been the case. Progress has been hampered by technical problems which have…
Solitons in liquid crystals have generated considerable interest. Several hypotheses of varying complexity have been advanced to explain how they emerge, and a consensus has not emerged yet about the underlying forces responsible for their…
The underlying structural disorder renders the concept of topological defects in amorphous solids difficult to apply and hinders a first-principle identification of the microscopic carriers of plasticity and of the regions more prone to…
Deformed droplets are ubiquitous in various industrial applications, such as inkjet printing, lab-on-a-chip devices, and spray cooling, and can fundamentally affect the involved applications both favorably and unfavorably. Here, we employ…
We analyze the optical resonances of a dielectric sphere whose surface has been slightly deformed in an arbitrary way. Setting up a perturbation series up to second order, we derive both the frequency shifts and modified linewidths. Our…
We report the results of studies of torsion effect on the optical birefringence in LiNbO3 crystals. We have found that twisting of those crystals causes a birefringence distribution revealing non-trivial peculiarities. In particular, it has…
Self-assembly of colloidal particles due to elastic interactions in nematic liquid crystals promises tunable composite materials and can be guided by exploiting surface functionalization, geometric shape and topology, though these means of…
In this paper we discuss the behavior of the Oseen-Frank model for nematic liquid crystals in the limit of vanishing thickness. More precisely, in a thin slab~$\Omega\times (0,h)$ with~$\Omega\subset \mathbb{R}^2$ and $h>0$ we consider the…
We consider a one-dimensional system comprising of $N$ run-and-tumble particles confined in a harmonic trap interacting via a repulsive inverse-square power-law interaction. We numerically compute the global density profile in the steady…
Nematic liquid crystals exhibit configurations in which the underlying ordering changes markedly on macroscopic length scales. Such structures include topological defects in the nematic phase and tactoids within nematic-isotropic…
We study elasticity of spontaneously orientationally-ordered amorphous solids, characterized by a vanishing transverse shear modulus, as realized for example by nematic elastomers and gels. We show that local heterogeneities and elastic…
What characterises a solid is its way to respond to external stresses. Ordered solids, such crystals, display an elastic regime followed by a plastic one, both well understood microscopically in terms of lattice distortion and dislocations.…
Curved particles have been shown to stabilize a range of states with unique order in dense suspensions of colloidal bent core liquid crystals. The shape of the colloidal rods encourages the formation of curved director fields. However,…
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…
Levitated nanospheres in optical cavities open a novel route to study many-body systems out of solution and highly isolated from the environment. We show that properly tuned optical parameters allow for the study of the non-equilibrium…
We derive a F\"{o}ppl-von K\'{a}rm\'{a}n-type constitutive model for solid liquid crystalline plates where the nematic director may or may not rotate freely relative to the elastic network. To obtain the reduced two-dimensional model, we…