Related papers: Design of nematic liquid crystals to control micro…
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…
Motile living organisms routinely probe their surroundings to adapt in ever-evolving environments. Although synthetic microswimmers offer surrogates for self-propelled living entities, they often lack the complex feedback mechanisms that…
We present a mesoscopic lattice model for non-ideal fluid flows with directional interactions, mimicking the effects of hydrogen-bonds in water. The model supports a rich and complex structural dynamics of the orientational order parameter,…
We use moving light patterns to control the motion of {\it Escherichia coli} bacteria whose motility is photo-activated. Varying the pattern speed controls the magnitude and direction of the bacterial flux, and therefore the accumulation of…
Monopole-like electrostatic interactions are ubiquitous in biology and condensed matter, but they are often screened by counter-ions and cannot be switched from attractive to repulsive. In colloidal science, where the prime goal is to…
We propose a simple microscopic model of molecular dynamics simulation to study orientational glass in three dimensions. We present simulation results for mixtures of mildly anisotropic particles and spherical impurities. We realize fcc…
We explore the diffusion dynamics of a Brownian microparticle in a lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal (LCLC). In the planarly oriented nematic phase, the microparticle exhibits levitation and anisotropic two-dimensional diffusion. Upon…
The self-propelled motion of microscopic bodies immersed in a fluid medium is studied using molecular dynamics simulation. The advantage of the atomistic approach is that the detailed level of description allows complete freedom in…
Linear defects such as dislocations and disclinations in ordered materials attract foreign particles since they replace strong elastic distortions at the defect cores. In this work, we explore the behavior of isotropic droplets nucleating…
Continuum hydrodynamic models of active liquid crystals have been used to describe dynamic self-organising systems such as bacterial swarms and cytoskeletal gels. A key prediction of such models is the existence of self-stabilising kink…
We formulate a lattice Boltzmann algorithm which solves the hydrodynamic equations of motion for nematic liquid crystals. The applicability of the approach is demonstrated by presenting results for two liquid crystal devices where flow has…
The directed self-assembly of colloidal nanoparticles (NPs) using external fields guides the formation of sophisticated hierarchical materials but becomes less effective with decreasing particle size. As an alternative, electron-beam-driven…
Active nematics, in their pure form, have demonstrated a plethora of dynamic and steady state behaviors, including large-scale dynamic structures, collective flows, and intricate multi-spatial temporal dynamics. This complexity further…
Physical properties of composite materials can be pre-engineered by controlling their structure and composition at the mesoscale. Yet, approaches for achieving this are limited and rarely scalable. We introduce a new breed of self-assembled…
Elliptic shear applied to a homeotropically oriented nematic above the electric bend Freedericks transition (FT) generates slow precession of the director. The character of the accompanying nonlinear waves changes from diffusive phase waves…
We show by means of continuum theory and simulations that geometric percolation in uniaxial nematics of hard slender particles is fundamentally different from that in isotropic dispersions. In the nematic, percolation depends only very…
Liquid crystals (LCs) composed of mesogens play important roles in various scientific and engineering problems. How a system with many mesogens can enter a LC state is an interesting and important problem. Using stiff and free-joint…
A chain of metallic particles, of sufficiently small diameter and spacing, allows linearly polarized plasmonic waves to propagate along the chain. In this paper, we consider how these waves are altered by an anisotropic host (such as a…
The biopolymers actin and microtubules are often in an ongoing assembling/disassembling state far from thermal equilibrium. Above a critical density this leads to spatially periodic patterns, as shown by a scaling argument and in terms of a…
We show that back-flow, the coupling between the order parameter and the velocity fields, has a significant effect on the motion of defects in nematic liquid crystals. In particular the defect speed can depend strongly on the topological…