Related papers: Design of nematic liquid crystals to control micro…
We study spreading dynamics of nematic liquid crystal droplets within the framework of the long-wave approximation. A fourth order nonlinear parabolic partial differential equation governing the free surface evolution is derived. The…
Nematic liquid crystals have been known for more than a century, but it was not until the 60s-70s that, with the development of room temperature nematics, they became widely used in applications. Polar nematic phases have been long-time…
The locomotion and design of microswimmers are topical issues of current fundamental and applied research. In addition to numerous living and artificial active microswimmers, a passive microswimmer was identified only recently: a soft,…
Molecular anisotropy plays an important role in the glass transition of a liquid. Recently, a novel bulk glass state has been discovered by optical microscopy experiments on suspensions of ellipsoidal colloids. 'Liquid glass' is a…
We consider a continuum model describing the dynamic behavior of nematic liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) and implement a numerical scheme to solve the governing equations. In the model, the Helmholtz free energy and Rayleigh dissipation…
Nematic order is the breaking of rotational symmetry in the presence of translational invariance. While originally defined in the context of liquid crystals, the concept of nematic order has arisen in crystalline matter with discrete…
We describe electrophoresis of spherical dielectric particles in a uniformly aligned nematic medium with a negative dielectric anisotropy. A spherical particle that orients the liquid crystal (LC) perpendicularly to its surface moves under…
Using experiments and numerical simulations, we demonstrate that the curvature of microscale conduits allow programming of liquid crystal (LC) flows. Focusing on a nematic LC flowing through U- and L-shaped channels of rectangular…
Research on transport, self-assembly and defect dynamics within confined, flowing liquid crystals requires versatile and computationally efficient mesoscopic algorithms to account for fluctuating nematohydrodynamic interactions. We present…
Particle tracking passive microrheology in 8CB liquid crystals is used to redefine the precessional motion of the orientation of nematic director in liquid crystals. Physical origin of tumbling director in presence of presmectic clusters…
Dispersions of rodlike colloidal particles exhibit a plethora of liquid crystalline states, including nematic, smectic A, smectic B, and columnar phases. This phase behavior can be explained by presuming the predominance of hard-core volume…
Physically intelligent micro-robotic systems exploit information embedded in micro-robots, their colloidal cargo, and their milieu to interact, assemble and form functional structures. Nonlinear anisotropic fluids like nematic liquid…
Active colloids and liquid crystals are capable of locally converting the macroscopically-supplied energy into directional motion and promise a host of new applications, ranging from drug delivery to cargo transport at the mesoscale. Here…
Nematic liquid-crystal devices are a powerful tool to structure light in different degrees of freedom, both in classical and quantum regimes. Most of these devices exploit either the possibility of introducing a position-dependent phase…
Recent studies have shown that packings of cells, both eukaryotic cellular tissues and growing or swarming bacterial colonies, can often be understood as active nematic fluids. A key property of volume-conserving active nematic model…
We investigate the connection between the transport properties and the thermodynamics of electronic systems with a tendency to form broken-symmetry mesophases evocative of the physics of liquid crystals. Through a hydrodynamic approach to…
Two-dimensional active nematics are often modeled using phenomenological continuum theories that describe the dynamics of the nematic director and fluid velocity through partial differential equations (PDEs). While these models provide a…
We theoretically investigate the threshold for the director reorientation from the homeotropic state to the hybrid homeotropic-planar state and vice versa in a cell filled with a flexoelectric nematic liquid crystal (NLC) subjected to an…
A theoretical analysis of homeotropic alignment induced by nanoparticles (NPs) in a nematic liquid crystal (NLC) sample cell is presented. It is found that such alignment on the surface of a NP causes a change in the orientation of the…
We present experiments where anisometric colloidal microparticles dispersed in a nematic liquid crystal cell with homeotropic anchoring conditions are dynamically assembled by means of liquid-crystal-enabled electrophoresis (LCEEP) using an…