Related papers: Dynamical Landau-de Gennes Theory for Electrically…
We investigate theoretically the morphology of a thin nematic film adsorbed at flat substrate patterned by stripes with alternating aligning properties, normal and tangential respectively. We construct a simple "exactly-solvable" effective…
An effective Landau-like description of ferronematics, i.e., suspensions of magnetic colloidal particles in a nematic liquid crystal (NLC), is developed in terms of the corresponding magnetization and nematic director fields. The study is…
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…
Surface-induced profiles of both nematic and smectic order parameters in a nematic liquid crystal, ranging from an orienting substrate to "infinity", were evaluated numerically on base of an extended Landau theory. In order to obtain a…
The guest-host liquid crystal display, first proposed in 1968, relies on controlling the orientation of dichroic dyes dissolved in a nematic liquid crystal host. Controlling the orientation of the liquid crystal and of the dissolved dye…
Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) marry the large deformation response of a cross-linked polymer network with the nematic order of liquid crystals pendent to the network. Of particular interest is the actuation of LCE sheets where the…
We study the mechanical response of a dislocation-free 2D crystal under homogenous shear using a new mesoscopic approach to crystal plasticity, a Landau-type theory, accounting for the global invariance of the energy in the space of strain…
We study dynamical optical response of a nematic liquid crystal cell that undergoes the splay-bend transition after applying the voltage across the cell. We formulate a simplified model that takes into account both the flexoelectric…
Nematic liquid crystals at rough and fluctuating interfaces are analyzed within the Frank elastic theory and the Landau-de Gennes theory. We study specifically interfaces that locally favor planar anchoring. In the first part we reconsider…
We propose a simple surface potential favoring the planar degenerate anchoring of nematic liquid crystals, i.e., the tendency of the molecules to align parallel to one another along any direction parallel to the surface. We show that, at…
Recent studies of azo-dye doped liquid crystal elastomers show a strong photomechanical response. We report on models that predict experimental results that suggest photothermal heating is the dominant mechanism in a planar constrained…
We construct a phenomenological Landau-de Gennes theory for hard colloidal rods by performing an order parameter expansion of the chemical-potential dependent grand potential. By fitting the coefficients to known results of Onsager theory,…
Although pathway-specific kinetic theories are fundamentally important to describe and under- stand reversible polymerisation kinetics, they come in principle at a cost of having a large number of system-specific parameters. Here, we…
Liquid crystal elastomers are special cross-linked polymer materials combining the large elastic deformability of elastomers with the orientational orders of liquid crystals. This model exhibits markedly different phenomena than the liquid…
We study the asymptotic behavior of the minimisers of the Landau-de Gennes model for nematic liquid crystals in a two-dimensional domain in the regime of small elastic constant. At leading order in the elasticity constant, the…
In this paper, we study an elastic bilayer plate composed of a nematic liquid crystal elastomer in the top layer and a nonlinearly elastic material in the bottom layer. While the bottom layer is assumed to be stress-free in the flat…
The Landau-de Gennes model of liquid crystals is a functional acting on wave functions (order parameters) and vector fields (director fields). In a specific asymptotic limit of the physical parameters, we construct critical points such that…
Liquid crystalline networks (LCNs) are stimuli-responsive materials formed from polymeric chains cross-linked with rod-like mesogenic segments, which, in the nematic phase, align along a non-polar director. A key characteristic of these…
Liquid crystal elastomers represent a novel class of programmable shape-transforming materials whose shape change trajectory is encoded in the material's nematic director field. Using three-dimensional nonlinear finite element…
Liquid crystal elastomers are rubbery solids that couple liquid crystalline order and deformation. This coupling leads to properties that are attractive for a number of applications in soft robotics and energy absorption. This paper is…