Related papers: Photomechanical coupling in photoactive nematic el…
We investigate the dynamics of active nematic liquid crystals on deformable membranes, focusing on the interplay between active stress and anisotropic curvature coupling. Using a minimal model, we simulate the coupled evolution of the…
Mechanical amorphization, a widely observed phenomenon, has been utilized to synthesize novel phases by inducing disorder through external loading, thereby expanding the realm of glass-forming systems. Empirically, it has been plausible…
The deformation and flow of disordered solids, such as metallic glasses and concentrated emulsions, involves swift localized rearrangements of particles that induce a long-range deformation field. To describe these heterogeneous processes,…
We provide experimental evidence that photoalignment at the nematic liquid crystal (NLC) - polymer interface can not be simply considered as a two-dimensional process. Moreover, our experiments clearly indicate that the photoaligning…
Active elastomeric liquid crystal particles with initial cylindrical shapes are obtained by means of soft lithography and polymerization in a strong magnetic field. Gold nanocrystals infiltrated into these particles mediate energy transfer…
The influence of static stress and alternating loading direction on the potential energy and mechanical properties of amorphous alloys is investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. The model glass is represented via a binary mixture…
Nematic elastomers and glasses are solids that display spontaneous distortion under external stimuli. Recent advances in the synthesis of sheets with controlled heterogeneities have enabled their actuation into non-trivial shapes with…
We use Photon Correlation Imaging, a recently introduced space-resolved dynamic light scattering method, to investigate the spatial correlation of the dynamics of a variety of jammed and glassy soft materials. Strikingly, we find that in…
Recent advancements in electron microscopy have introduced innovative techniques enabling the inelastic interaction of fast electrons with tightly confined and intense light fields. These techniques, commonly summarized under the term…
The collective response of a system is profoundly shaped by the interaction dynamics between its constituent elements. In physics, tailoring these interactions can enable the observation of unusual phenomena that are otherwise inaccessible…
Most, but not all, liquid crystals tend to align when subject to shear flow, while most nematic polymeric liquid crystals undergo a tumbling instability, where the director rotate with the flow. The reasons of this instability remain…
The interplay between active matter and its environment is central to understanding emergent behavior in biological and synthetic systems. Here, we show that coupling active nematic flows to small-amplitude deformations of a compliant…
There is now growing evidence of the emergence and biological functionality of liquid crystal features, including nematic order and topological defects, in cellular tissues. However, how such features that intrinsically rely on particle…
The propagation of the quantum states of light in dispersive and anisotropic media is a fundamental problem in quantum optics. We present a unified theoretical framework for the propagation of the quantum states of light in…
The formation of a stable magneto plasmonic dimer with THz resonances is theoretically studied for the principal directions of the system. Unlike a recent report, our work provides a complete description of the full photonic coupling for…
In the field of soft dielectric elastomers, the notion electrostriction indicates the dependency of the permittivity on strain. The present paper is aimed at investigating the effects of electrostriction onto the stability behaviour of…
We address the physics of nematic liquid crystalline elastomers randomly crosslinked in the isotropic state. To do this, we construct a phenomenological effective replica Hamiltonian in terms of two order-parameter fields: one for the…
For monodomain nematic elastomers, we construct generalised elastic-nematic constitutive models combining purely elastic and neoclassical-type strain-energy densities. Inspired by recent developments in stochastic elasticity, we extend…
The hydrodynamic theory of active nematics has been often used to describe the spatio-temporal dynamics of cell flows and motile topological defects within soft confluent tissues. Those theories, however, often rely on the assumption that…
The mechanics of a flexible membrane decorated with a nematic liquid-crystal texture is considered in a variational framework. The variations on the splay, twist and the bend energy of the nematics are obtained from the local deformations…