Related papers: Design of nematic liquid crystals to control micro…
We review the impact of tetrahedral order on the macroscopic dynamics of bent-core liquid crystals. We discuss tetrahedral order comparing with other types of orientational order, like nematic, polar nematic, polar smectic, and active polar…
Colloidal particles dispersed in a partially ordered medium, such as a liquid crystal (LC) phase, disturb its alignment and are subject to elastic forces. These forces are long-ranged, anisotropic and tunable through temperature or external…
We studied in-plane bistable alignments of nematic liquid crystals confined by two frustrated surfaces by means of Monte Carlo simulations of the Lebwohl-Lasher spin model. The surfaces are prepared with orientational checkerboard patterns,…
Active nematics are out-of-equilibrium systems in which energy injection at the microscale drives emergent collective behaviors, from spontaneous flows to active turbulence. While the dynamics of these systems have been extensively studied,…
Wrinkles commonly develop in a thin film deposited on a soft elastomer substrate when the film is subject to compression. Motivated by recent experiments [Agrawal et al., Soft Matter 8, 7138 (2012)] that show how wrinkle morphology can be…
Electrically-controlled dynamics of fluids and particles at microscales is a fascinating area of research with applications ranging from microfluidics and sensing to sorting of biomolecules. The driving mechanisms are electric forces acting…
Nematic liquid crystals are well modeled as a fluid of rigid rods. Starting from this model, we use a Poisson-bracket formalism to derive the equations governing the dynamics of nematic liquid crystals. We treat the spin angular momentum…
A spontaneous buckling transition in thin layers of monodomain nematic liquid crystalline gel was observed by polarized light microscopy. The coupling between the orientational ordering of liquid crystalline solvent and the translational…
In culture migrating and interacting amoeboid cells can form nematic liquid crystal phases. A polar nematic liquid crystal is formed if the interaction has a polar symmetry. One type of white blood cells (granulocytes) form clusters where…
In liquid crystal elastomers, the orientational order of liquid crystals is coupled with elastic distortions of crosslinked polymer networks. Previous theoretical research has described these materials through two different approaches: a…
From the mitotic spindle up to tissues and biofilms, many biological systems behave as active droplets, which often break symmetry and change shape spontaneously. Here, I show that active nematic droplets can experience a fingering…
Aqueous dispersions of exfoliated, bile-salt stabilized single-wall carbon nanotubes exhibit a first order transition to a nematic liquid-crystalline phase. The nematic phase presents itself in the form of micron-sized nematic droplets also…
Active (i.e., self-propelled or swimming) particles moving through an isotropic fluid exhibit conventional diffusive behavior. We report anomalous diffusion of an active particle moving in an anisotropic, nematic background. Whilst the…
Engineering synthetic materials that mimic the remarkable complexity of living organisms is a fundamental challenge in science and technology. We study the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematicfilm of microtubules and…
The development of synthetic microswimmers has advanced our understanding of the fundamental self-propelled mechanisms of living systems. However, there are scarce studies at the microscale within highly structured anisotropic media, such…
Light provides a powerful means of controlling physical behavior of materials but is rarely used to power and guide active matter systems. We demonstrate optical control of liquid crystalline topological solitons dubbed "skyrmions", which…
A paradigm for internally driven matter is the active nematic liquid crystal, whereby the equations of a conventional nematic are supplemented by a minimal active stress that violates time reversal symmetry. In practice, active fluids may…
We examine the dynamics of a compressible active nematic liquid crystal on a frictional substrate. When frictional damping dominates over viscous dissipation, we eliminate flow in favor of active stresses to obtain a minimal dynamical model…
We investigate dynamic magneto-optic effects in a ferromagnetic nematic liquid crystal experimentally and theoretically. Experimentally we measure the magnetization and the phase difference of the transmitted light when an external magnetic…
Real-life bacteria often swim in complex fluids, but our understanding of the interactions between bacteria and complex surroundings is still evolving. In this work, rod-like \textit{Bacillus subtilis} swims in a quasi-2D environment with…