Related papers: Director Deformations, Geometric Frustration, and …
Geometric frustration describes the inability of a local molecular arrangement, such as icosahedra found in metallic glasses and in model atomic glass-formers, to tile space. Local icosahedral order however is strongly frustrated in…
Rod-like objects at high packing fractions can form smectic phases, where the rods break rotational and translational symmetry by forming lamellae. Smectic defects thereby include both discontinuities in the rod orientational order…
A flux liquid can condense into a smectic crystal in a pure layered superconductors with the magnetic field oriented nearly parallel to the layers. If the smectic order is commensurate with the layering, this crystal is {\sl stable} to…
We have studied spectral properties of a cholesteric liquid crystal with a combined defect consisting of a nanocomposite layer and a twist. The nanocomposite layer is made of metallic nanoballs dispersed in a transparent matrix and…
Motivated by recently discovered unusual properties of bulk nematic elastomers, we study a phase diagram of liquid-crystalline polymerized phantom membranes, focusing on in-plane nematic order. We predict that such membranes should…
Dispersions of rodlike colloidal particles exhibit a plethora of liquid crystalline states, including nematic, smectic A, smectic B, and columnar phases. This phase behavior can be explained by presuming the predominance of hard-core volume…
We study the director field around a spherical particle immersed in a uniformly aligned nematic liquid crystal and assume that the molecules prefer a homeotropic orientation at the surface of the particle. Three structures are possible: a…
In this work we numerically study the switching dynamics of a 2D cholesteric emulsion droplet immersed in an isotropic fluid under an electric field, which is either uniform or rotating with constant speed. The overall dynamics depend…
Nematic liquid crystals confined to geometrically as well as chemically patterned substrate on one end and a flat substrate with strong anchoring on the other is studied using non-Boltzmann Monte Carlo methods. We observe significant…
Many physical systems involve two types of orientational order, which are coupled together. For example, ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals have coupled polar and nematic order, and tilted hexatic phases have coupled polar and hexatic…
Polymer-grafted nanoparticles are versatile building blocks that self-assemble into a rich diversity of mesostructures. Coarse-grained molecular simulations have commonly accompanied experiments by resolving structure formation pathways and…
This letter presents a closed-form integral-equation formulation that models the director tilting in nematic liquid crystals. The proposed formulation is computationally efficient compared to numerical methods and provides a physical…
We theoretically investigate the threshold for the director reorientation from the homeotropic state to the hybrid homeotropic-planar state and vice versa in a cell filled with a flexoelectric nematic liquid crystal (NLC) subjected to an…
Based on static and dynamical density functional theory, a phase-field-crystal model is derived which involves both the translational density and the orientational degree of ordering as well as a local director field. The model exhibits…
Using particle-resolved molecular-dynamics simulations, we compute the phase diagram for soft repulsive spherocylinders confined on the surface of a sphere. While crystal (K), smectic (Sm), and isotropic (I) phases exhibit a stability…
Topological defects are a ubiquitous phenomenon in diverse physical systems. In nematic liquid crystals (LCs), they are dynamic, physicochemically distinct, sensitive to stimuli, and are thereby promising for a range of applications.…
Disclination lines in nematic liquid crystals can exist in different geometric conformations, characterised by their director profile. In certain confined, colloidal and even more prominently in chiral nematics, the director profile may…
A nonlinear model due to Soddemann et al. [37] and Stewart [38] describing incompressible smectic-A liquid crystals under flow is studied. In comparison to previously considered models, this particular model takes into account possible…
Spontaneous self-assembly of hard convex polyhedra are known to form orientationally disordered crystalline phases, where particle orientations do not follow the same pattern as the positional arrangement of the crystal. A distinct type of…
An elastomer swelling actuator deforms by absorbing a fluid, thus generating mechanical movement. We show that depositing small droplets of low molecular weight liquid crystal on liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) films leads to shape changes…