Related papers: Elastomeric Nematic Colloids, Colloidal Crystals a…
Wrinkles commonly develop in a thin film deposited on a soft elastomer substrate when the film is subject to compression. Motivated by recent experiments [Agrawal et al., Soft Matter 8, 7138 (2012)] that show how wrinkle morphology can be…
Mixing colloid shapes with distinctly different anisotropy generates composite nematics in which the order of the individual components can be fundamentally different. In colloidal rod-disk mixtures or hybrid nematics composed of…
Self-propelled colloidal particles exhibit rich non-equilibrium phenomena and have promising applications in fields such as drug delivery and self-assembled active materials. Previous experimental and theoretical studies have shown that…
Weakly attractive interactions between the tips of rod-like colloidal particles affect their liquid-crystal phase behaviour due to a subtle interplay between enthalpy and entropy. Here, we employ molecular dynamics simulations on…
Field-induced assembly of colloidal particles into structures of desired configurations is extremely relevant from the viewpoint of producing field-assembled micro-swimmers and reconfigurable smart materials. However, the behaviour of…
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…
We study by simulation the physics of two colloidal particles in a cholesteric liquid crystal with tangential order parameter alignment at the particle surface. The effective force between the pair is attractive at short range and favors…
Chiral nematic liquid crystals exhibit both a helical planar ground state with uniform twist and a metastable defect-rich focal conic texture, and can be switched between the two microstructures via application of transient voltage pulses.…
This mini-review discusses the recent contribution of theoretical and computational physics as well as experimental efforts to the understanding of the behavior of colloidal particles in confined geometries and at liquid crystalline…
Chemical communication, response, and feedback are key requirements for the function of adaptive materials with life-like properties. However, how communication on the single cell-level impacts the collective structural, dynamical and…
We describe a soft matter system of self-organized oblate micelles and plasmonic gold nanorods that exhibit a negative orientational order parameter. Because of anisotropic surface anchoring interactions, colloidal gold nanorods tend to…
Aggregation processes in systems of planar macromolecules and colloids drive a broad range of phenomena in natural systems and soft materials. Depending on chemical architecture, intermolecular interactions in these systems may favor…
We address the physics of nematic liquid crystalline elastomers randomly crosslinked in the isotropic state. To do this, we construct a phenomenological effective replica Hamiltonian in terms of two order-parameter fields: one for the…
Soft elastic composite materials can serve as actuators when they transform changes in external fields into mechanical deformation. Here, we address the corresponding deformational behavior of magnetic gels and elastomers, consisting of…
We study the dynamics of a driven spherical colloidal particle moving in a fluid with a broken rotational symmetry. Using a nematic liquid crystal as a model, we demonstrate that when the applied force is not aligned along or perpendicular…
We show that the elastic charge of colloids in a nematic liquid crystal can be generated by the vector of external torque. The torque components play the role of two component charge (dyad) and give rise to the Coulomb-like potential, while…
We study the effects of colloidal nanoparticles (NPs) in liquid crystal samples in the dilute limit, in a Landau--de Gennes theoretical framework. The effects of the suspended NPs are captured by a homogenized energy, as outlined…
Morphogenesis of living systems involves topological shape transformations which are highly unusual in the inanimate world. Here we demonstrate that a droplet of a nematic liquid crystal changes its equilibrium shape from a simply-connected…
Molecules of a nematic liquid crystal respond to an applied magnetic field by reorienting themselves in the direction of the field. Since the dielectric anisotropy of a nematic is small, it takes relatively large fields to elicit a…
We study the phase ordering colloids suspended in a thermotropic nematic liquid crystal below the clearing point Tni and the resulting aggregated structure. Small (150nm) PMMA particles are dispersed in a classical liquid crystal matrix,…