Related papers: Elastomeric Nematic Colloids, Colloidal Crystals a…
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…
Cholesteric Liquid Crystals (CLCs), subject to externally applied magnetic fields and confined between two parallel planar surfaces with strong homeotropic anchoring conditions, are found to undergo transitions to different types of…
Combining molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulation we study defect structures around an elongated colloidal particle embedded in a nematic liquid crystal host. By studying nematic ordering near the particle and the disclination core…
Freezing of charged colloids on square or triangular two-dimensional periodic substrates has been recently shown to realize a rich variety of orientational orders. We propose a theoretical framework to analyze the corresponding structures.…
We study the interaction of small hydrophobic particles on the surface of an ultra-soft elastic gel, in which a small amount of elasticity of the medium balances the weights of the particles. The excess energy of the surface of the deformed…
We investigate the phase behavior of colloidal suspensions of board-like particles under the effect of an external field and assess the still disputed occurrence of the biaxial nematic (N$_\text{B}$) liquid crystal phase. The external field…
Despite the fundamental importance of solid--solid transitions for metallurgy, ceramics, earth science, reconfigurable materials, and colloidal matter, the details of how materials transform between two solid structures are poorly…
We predict theoretically the existence of a class of colloidal structures in nematic liquid crystal (NLC) cells, which are induced by surface patterns on the plates of the cell (like cells with UV-irradiated polyimide surfaces using micron…
Colloidal molecules are ideal model systems for mimicking real molecules and can serve as versatile building blocks for the bottom-up self-assembly of flexible and smart materials. While most colloidal molecules are rigid objects, the…
Chirality is ubiquitous in nature and plays crucial roles in biology, medicine, physics and materials science. Understanding and controlling chirality is therefore an important research challenge with broad implications in fundamental and…
The elastic and capillary interactions between a pair of colloidal particles trapped on top of a nematic film are studied theoretically for large separations $d$. The elastic interaction is repulsive and of quadrupolar type, varying as…
Tunable nanopores in elastomeric membranes have been used to study the dependence of ionic current blockade rate on the concentration and electrophoretic mobility of particles in aqueous suspensions. A range of nanoparticle sizes, materials…
The kinetics of phase transition processes often governs the resulting material microstruc-ture. Using optical microscopy, we here investigate the formation and stabilization of a po-rous crystalline microstructure forming in low-salt…
Monodisperse rod-like colloidal particles are known for spontaneously forming both nematic and smectic liquid crystal phases, but their self-assembly was typically exploited from the fundamental soft condensed matter physics perspective.…
Liquid crystal elastomers are cross-linked elastomer networks with liquid crystal mesogens incorporated into the main or side chain. Polydomain liquid crystalline (nematic) elastomers exhibit unusual mechanical properties like soft…
We investigate theoretically the elliptical shapes of soft colloids in freely standing smectic C films, that have been reported recently. The colloids favour parallel alignment of the liquid crystal molecules at their surfaces and, for…
Nuclei of ordered materials emerging from the isotropic state usually show a shape topologically equivalent to a sphere; the well-known examples are crystals and nematic liquid crystal droplets. In this work, we explore experimentally and…
Ferroelectric nematic phases are a new class of polar fluids in which spontaneous polarization is directly coupled to the orientational order, providing unique opportunities for creating self-organized materils with spatially modulated…
When captured by a flat nematic-isotropic interface, colloidal particles can be dragged by it. As a result spatially periodic structures may appear, with the period depending on a particle mass, size, and interface…
We study the behavior of negatively charged colloids with two positively charged polar caps close to a planar patterned surface. The competition between the different anisotropic components of the particle-particle interaction patterns is…