Related papers: Director Deformations, Geometric Frustration, and …
Smectic liquid crystals are charcterized by layers that have a preferred uniform spacing and vanishing curvature in their ground state. Dislocations in the smectics play an important role in phase nucleation, layer reorientation, and…
Motivated by experiments on colloidal membranes composed of chiral rod-like viruses, we use Monte Carlo methods to determine the phase diagram for the liquid crystalline order of the rods and the membrane shape. We generalize the…
The director configuration of disclination lines in nematic liquid crystals in the presence of an external magnetic field is evaluated. Our method is a combination of a polynomial expansion for the director and of further analytical…
Melting in 2D is described by the celebrated Kosterlitz-Thouless-Halperin-Nelson-Young (KTHNY) theory. The unbinding of two different types of topological defects destroys translational and orientational order at different temperatures. The…
We develop a theory of point defects in cholesterics and textures in spherical droplets with normal anchoring. The local structure of chiral defects is described by singularity theory and a smectic-like gradient field establishing a nexus…
We construct a new hydrodynamic framework describing plastic deformations in electronic crystals. The framework accounts for pinning, phase, and momentum relaxation effects due to translational disorder, diffusion due to the presence of…
Electronic nematic order has been reported in a rich landscape of materials, encompassing not only a range of intertwined correlated and topological phenomena, but also different underlying lattice symmetries. Motivated by these findings,…
In amorphous materials, plasticity is localized and occurs as shear transformations. It was recently shown by Wu et al. that these shear transformations can be predicted by applying topological defect concepts developed for liquid crystals…
We describe the occurence and properties of liquid crystal phases showing two dimensional splay and bend distortions which are stabilised by flexoelectric interactions. These phases are characterised by regions of locally double splayed…
We present an investigation of the phase diagram of cholesteric liquid crystals within the framework of Landau - de Gennes theory. The free energy is modified to incorporate all three Frank elastic constants and to allow for a temperature…
There are at least three fundamental states of matter, depending upon temperature and pressure: gas, liquid, and solid (crystal). These states are separated by first-order phase transitions between them. In both gas and liquid phases the…
We present a theoretical model which describes the polarization modulated and layer undulated structure of the B7 phase and gives the phase transition from the synclinic ferroelectric B2 phase to the B7 phase as observed experimentally. The…
The recently discovered twist-bend nematic phase, $\rm N_{tb}$, is a non-uniform equilibrium nematic phase that presents a spontaneous bend with a precession of the nematic director, $\textbf{n}$, on a conical helix with a tilt angle…
We present a generalized approach to compute the shape and internal structure of two-dimensional nematic domains. By using conformal mappings, we are able to compute the director field for a given domain shape that we choose from a rich…
We study dynamical processes in a multi-domain (MD) structured nematic liquid crystal cell with a particular emphasis on the motion, creation and annihilation of disclinations. In the MD cell right- and left-handed director helices…
Using the density functional formalism we derive expression for the distortion free energy for systems with continuous broken symmetry and use it to derive expression for the elastic constants of smectic phases in which director is tilted…
The mechanisms of void growth and coalescence are key contributors to the ductile failure of crystalline materials. At the grain scale, single crystal plastic anisotropy induces large strain localization leading to complex shape evolutions.…
Orientational and positional ordering properties of liquid crystal monolayers are examined by means of Fundamental-Measure Density Functional Theory. Particles forming the monolayer are modeled as hard parallelepipeds of square section of…
Toroidal nematics are nematic liquid crystals confined within a circular torus and subject to planar degenerate anchoring on the boundary of the torus. They may be droplets floating in an isotropic environment or cavities carved out of a…
We numerically study the dynamics of quasi-two dimensional cholesteric liquid crystal droplets in the presence of a time-dependent electric field, rotating at constant angular velocity. A surfactant sitting at droplet interface is also…