Related papers: Time dependent lyotropic chromonic textures in PDM…
Natural bacterial habitats are often complex fluids with viscoelastic and anisotropic responses to stress; for example, they can take the form of liquid crystals (LCs), with elongated microscopic constituents that collectively align while…
Understanding and controlling the director field configuration, shape, and orientation in nematic and cholesteric liquid crystals is of fundamental importance in several branches of science. Liquid crystalline droplets, also known as…
Optical microcavities have emerged as a powerful platform for emulating topological phases challenging to realize in conventional materials, offering precise control over dispersion, light confinement, and interactions. Among them, liquid…
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…
Lagrangian coherent structures (LCSs) are material surfaces that shape finite-time tracer patterns in flows with arbitrary time dependence. Depending on their deformation properties, elliptic and hyperbolic LCSs have been identified from…
Blue phase liquid crystal (BPLC) has important applications in adaptive lenses and phase modulators due to its polarization-independent property. During our efforts for development of the new materials, we found a novel phenomenology of…
In search for novel nematic materials, a laterally linked H-shaped liquid crystal dimer have been synthesized and characterized. The distinct feature of the material is a very broad temperature range (about 50 oC) of the nematic phase,…
Colloids dispersed in nematic liquid crystals form topological composites in which colloid-associated defects mediate interactions while adhering to fundamental topological constraints. Better realising the promise of such materials…
Lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals are formed by the self-assembly of aromatic compounds in concentrated solutions. Despite numerous applications of chromonic systems in optical and photonic devices, they all make use of the anisotropic…
There is considerable interest in understanding and controlling topological defects in nematic liquid crystals (LCs). Confinement, in the form of droplets, has been particularly effective in that regard. Here, we employ the Landau-de Gennes…
Chiral lattice modes are hybrid states arising from chiral plasmonic particles assembled in ordered arrays with opportune periodicity. These resonances exhibit dependence on excitation handedness, and their observation in plasmonic lattices…
Motivated by recent experiments, the isotropic-nematic phase transition in chromonic liquid crystals is studied. As temperature decreases, nematic nuclei nucleate, grow, and coalesce, giving rise to tactoid microstructures in an isotropic…
The confinement of an ionic liquid between charged solid surfaces is treated using an exactly solvable 1D Coulomb gas model. The theory highlights the importance of two dimensionless parameters: the fugacity of the ionic liquid, and the…
We study the non-equilibrium coarsening dynamics of a binary liquid solvent around a colloidal particle in a presence of a time-dependent temperature gradient that emerges after temperature quench of a suitably coated colloid surface. The…
Mono-layers of stearic and behenic acids and mixtures of them in different proportions, deposited with the Langmuir-Blodgett technique, were used to study the alignment and the alignment dynamics in nematic liquid crystal cells. A…
Liquid crystals formed of bent-core molecules are exotic materials that exhibit the twist-bend nematic phase. This arises when an energetic preference for nonzero local bend distortion is accommodated via twist in the texture, resulting in…
We study experimentally how the double-twist (DT) configuration of cylindrically confined lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals (LCLCs) responds to axial magnetic fields. Our director field model unveils the energetics behind the magnetic…
Chromonic nematics are lyotropic liquid crystals that have already been known for half a century, but have only recently raised interest for their potential applications in life sciences. Determining elastic constants and anchoring…
We explain the Lorentz resonances in plasmonic crystals that consist of 2D nano dielectric inclusions as the interaction between resonant material properties and geometric resonances of electrostatic nature. One example of such plasmonic…
We theoretically study the nematic ordering transition of rods that are able to elastically adjust their mutually excluded volumes. The model rods, which consist of a hard core surrounded by a deformable shell, mimic the structure of…