Related papers: Computational molecular field theory for nematic l…
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…
We develop a fully microscopic, statistical mechanics approach to study phase transitions in Ising systems with competing interactions at different scales. Our aim is to consider orientational and positional order parameters in a unified…
A computational study of morphological instabilities of a two-dimensional nematic front under directional growth was performed using a Landau-de Gennes type quadrupolar tensor order parameter model for the first-order isotropic/nematic…
Composed of microscopic layers that stack along one direction while maintaining fluid-like positional disorder within layers, smectics are excellent systems for exploring topology, defects and geometric memory in complex confining…
In the mathematical modeling of nematic liquid crystals, a practical and physically reliable $\mathbf{Q}$-tensor model can be derived from Onsager's molecular model with the Bingham closure. However, this procedure leads to a singular…
Computer simulations are presented of the isotropic-to-nematic transition in a liquid crystal confined between two parallel plates a distance H apart. The plates are neutral and do not impose any anchoring on the particles. Depending on the…
Both uniaxial and biaxial nematic liquid crystals are defined by orientational ordering of their building blocks. While uniaxial nematics only orient the long molecular axis, biaxial order implies local order along three axes. As the…
We use a variational principle to derive a mathematical model for a nematic electrolyte in which the liquid crystalline component is described in terms of a second-rank order tensor. The model extends the previously developed director-based…
Liquid crystals establish a nearly unique combination of thermodynamic, hydrodynamic, and topological behavior. This poses a challenge to their theoretical understanding and modeling. The arena where these effects come together is the…
Several experiments have reported that ferroelectric nanoparticles have drastic effects on nematic liquid crystals--increasing the isotropic-nematic transition temperature by about 5 K, and greatly increasing the sensitivity to applied…
We present a general theory of liquid crystals under inhomogeneous electric field in a Ginzburg-Landau scheme. The molecular orientation can be deformed by electric field when the dielectric tensor is orientation-dependent. We then…
The optical properties of liquid crystals serve as the basis for display, diagnostic, and sensing technologies. Such properties are generally controlled by relying on electric fields. In this work, we investigate the effects of microfluidic…
We introduce shape fluctuations in a liquid-crystalline system by considering an elementary Maier--Saupe lattice model for a mixture of uniaxial and biaxial molecules. Shape variables are treated in the annealed (thermalized) limit. We…
We discuss a dynamical theory for nematic liquid crystals describing the stage of evolution in which the hydrodynamic fluid motion has already equilibrated and the subsequent evolution proceeds via diffusive motion of the orientational…
We propose a continuum tensorial model for chiral smectic C (SmC$^*$) liquid crystals using a tensor-valued order parameter $\mathbf{Q}$ to describe orientational order and a real-valued order parameter $\delta\rho$ to capture layer…
We consider the weakly first order phase transition between the isotropic and ordered phases of nematics in terms of the behavior of topological line defects. Analytical and Monte Carlo results are presented for a new coarse-grained lattice…
Spontaneous onset of a low temperature topologically ordered phase in a 2-dimensional (2D) lattice model of uniaxial liquid crystal (LC) was debated extensively pointing to a suspected underlying mechanism affecting the RG flow near the…
The phase-ordering kinetics of a bulk uniaxial nematic liquid crystal is addressed using techniques that have been successfully applied to describe ordering in the O(n) model. The method involves constructing an appropriate mapping between…
Motivated by recent experiments, the isotropic-nematic phase transition in chromonic liquid crystals is studied. As temperature decreases, nematic nuclei nucleate, grow, and coalesce, giving rise to tactoid microstructures in an isotropic…
Electronic nematic order has been reported in a rich landscape of materials, encompassing not only a range of intertwined correlated and topological phenomena, but also different underlying lattice symmetries. Motivated by these findings,…