Related papers: Dynamical Landau-de Gennes Theory for Electrically…
The properties of liquid crystals can be modelled using an order parameter which describes the variability of the local orientation of rod-like molecules. Defects in the director field can arise due to external factors such as applied…
In the last years self-motile droplets attracted the attention of scientists from different fields ranging from applied biology to theoretical physics, because of their promising technological applications and important biological…
Liquid crystal elastomers are cross-linked polymer networks covalently bonded with liquid crystal mesogens. In the nematic phase, due to strong coupling between mechanical strain and orientational order, these materials display…
A lattice Boltzmann scheme is presented which recovers the dynamics of nematic and chiral liquid crystals; the method essentially gives solutions to the Qian-Sheng equations for the evolution of the velocity and tensor order-parameter…
Nematic liquid crystals exhibit configurations in which the underlying ordering changes markedly on macroscopic length scales. Such structures include topological defects in the nematic phase and tactoids within nematic-isotropic…
Nematic liquid crystal (LC) molecules adsorbed on two dimensional materials are aligned along the crystal directions of the hexagonal lattice. It was demonstrated that short electric pulses can reorient the aligned LC molecules in the…
We present a theoretical method for deriving the stress tensor and elastic response of ordered systems within a Ginzburg-Landau type density field theory in the linear regime. This is based on spatially coarse graining the microscopic…
This paper presents a 3D mesh adaptivity strategy on unstructured tetrahedral meshes by a posteriori error estimates based on metrics, studied on the case of a nonlinear finite element minimization scheme for the Landau-de Gennes free…
Deformation due to embedded fluidic networks is currently studied in the context of soft-actuators and soft-robotics. Expanding on this concept, beams can be designed so that the pressure in the channel-network is created directly from…
Chromonic liquid crystals (CLCs) are lyotropic materials which are attracting growing interest for their adaptability to living systems. A considerable body of works has been devoted to exploring their properties and applications. In this…
Thanks to their unique properties, nematic liquid crystals feature a variety of mechanisms for light-matter interactions. For continuous-wave optical excitations, the two dominant contributions stem from reorientational and thermal…
Anisotropic fluids, such as nematic liquid crystals, can form non-spherical equilibrium shapes known as tactoids. Predicting the shape of these structures as a function of material parameters is challenging and paradigmatic of a broader…
An exact solution of a Landau model of an order-disorder transition with activated critical dynamics is presented. The model describes a funnel-shaped topography of the order parameter space in which the number of energy lowering…
We numerically study the dynamics of quasi-two dimensional cholesteric liquid crystal droplets in the presence of a time-dependent electric field, rotating at constant angular velocity. A surfactant sitting at droplet interface is also…
Liquid crystal elastomers realize a fascinating new form of soft matter that is a composite of a conventional crosslinked polymer gel (rubber) and a liquid crystal. These {\em solid} liquid crystal amalgams, quite similarly to their…
We study the optical response of a metamaterial surface created by a lattice of split-ring resonators covered with a nematic liquid crystal and demonstrate millisecond timescale switching between electric and magnetic resonances of the…
Uniaxial nematic liquid crystals are modelled in the Oseen-Frank theory through a unit vector field $n$. This theory has the apparent drawback that it does not respect the head-to-tail symmetry in which $n$ should be equivalent to -$n$.…
We develop a Landau theory for bend flexoelectricity in liquid crystals of bent-core molecules. In the nematic phase of the model, the bend flexoelectric coefficient increases as we reduce the temperature toward the nematic to polar phase…
A nematic liquid crystal (NLC) layer with the anisotropy axis modulated at a fixed rate q in the transverse direction is considered. If the layer locally constitutes a half-wave plate, then the thin-screen approximation predicts 100%…
We propose an efficient numerical scheme, based on the method of lines, for solving the Landau-de Gennes equations describing the relaxational dynamics of nematic liquid crystals. Our method is computationally easy to implement, balancing…