Related papers: Structural Landscapes in Geometrically Frustrated …
Ionic liquid crystals (ILCs) are anisotropic mesogenic molecules which additionally carry charges. This combination gives rise to a complex interplay of the underlying (anisotropic) contributions to the pair interactions. It promises…
We present detailed systematic studies of structural transformations in thin liquid crystal films with the smectic-C to hexatic phase transition. For the first time all possible structures reported in the literature are observed for one…
Relaxation phenomena in glasses can be related to jump processes between different minima of the potential energy in the configuration space. These transitions play a key role in the low temperature regime, giving rise to tunneling systems…
The system of mixed hexagonal and square lattices on a spherical surface is examined, with an emphasis on the exploration of the disclination patterns that form in the square-rich regime. To demonstrate the possible outcomes, the Hertzian…
We propose a metadynamics-based (MetaD-based) approach for constructing the free energy surface (FES) of vacancy dynamics in crystals. In this approach, the vacancy FES can be constructed without explicitly defining a unique vacancy…
Structural fluctuations in the thermal equilibrium of the kinesin motor domain are studied using a lattice protein model with Go interactions. By means of the multi-self-overlap ensemble (MSOE) Monte Carlo method and the principal component…
We study the strong role played by structural (quenched) heterogeneities on static and dynamic properties of the Frustrated Ising Lattice Gas in two dimensions, already in the liquid phase. Differently from the dynamical heterogeneities…
The Voronoi model is a popular tool for studying confluent living tissues. It exhibits an anomalous glassy behavior even at very low temperatures or weak active self-propulsion, and at zero temperature the model exhibits a disordered solid…
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…
Under an electric field, chiral smectic liquid crystals transit usually to the unwound SmC* phase where the helical structure is completely unrolled. Sometimes the sample transits initially towards an intermediate polar state before the…
If a surface stabilized ferroelectric liquid crystal cell is cooled from the smectic-A to the smectic-C phase, its layers thin causing V-shaped (chevron like) defects to form. These create an energy barrier that can prevent switching…
We propose a new scenario for glassy dynamics in frustrated systems with no quenched-in randomness, based on jamming of extended dynamical structures near a critical point. This route to a glassy state is demonstrated in a lattice model of…
Geometric frustration results from a discrepancy between the locally favored arrangement of the constituents of a system and the geometry of the embedding space. Geometric frustration can be either non-cumulative, which implies an extensive…
There have been some interesting recent advances in understanding the notion of mechanical disorder in structural glasses and the statistical mechanics of these systems' low-energy excitations. Here we contribute to these advances by…
In a recent publication we established an analogy between the free energy of a hard sphere system and the energy of an elastic network [1]. This result enables one to study the free energy landscape of hard spheres, in particular to define…
Properties of the free energy landscape in phase space of a dense hard sphere system characterized by a discretized free energy functional of the Ramakrishnan-Yussouff form are investigated numerically. A considerable number of glassy local…
The energy landscape picture is a central tool to study many-body systems. In particular, the energy landscapes of glass-forming liquids, jammed packings, constraint satisfaction problems, or neural networks contain a plethora of minima…
The equilibrium state of a superfluid in a rotating cylindrical vessel is a vortex crystal -- an array of vortex lines which is stationary in the rotating frame. Experimental realisations of this behaviour typically show a sequence of…
We present the study of the landscape structure of athermal soft spheres both as a function of the packing fraction and of the energy. We find that, on approaching the jamming transition, the number of different configurations available to…
Smectite clay minerals have an outsize impact on the response of clay-rich media to common stimuli, such as water imbibition and ion exchange, motivating extensive effort to understand microscopic behaviors resulting from these processes…