Related papers: Cooling a spherical nematic shell
We study a simple model of a nematic liquid crystal made of parallel ellipsoidal particles interacting via a repulsive Gaussian law. After identifying the relevant solid phases of the system through a careful zero-temperature scrutiny of as…
A computational study of morphological instabilities of a two-dimensional nematic front under directional growth was performed using a Landau-de Gennes type quadrupolar tensor order parameter model for the first-order isotropic/nematic…
When a nematic liquid crystal (LC) is confined on a self-closing spherical shell, topological constraints arise with intriguing consequences that depend critically on how the LC is aligned in the shell. We demonstrate reversible dynamic…
An extension to a high-order model for the direct isotropic/smectic-A liquid crystalline phase transition was derived to take into account thermal effects including anisotropic thermal diffusion and latent heat of phase-ordering.…
Recent experiments report that the long looked for thermotropic biaxial nematic phase has been finally detected in some thermotropic liquid crystalline systems. Inspired by these experimental observations we concentrate on some elementary…
The thermodynamic model of ultrathin lubricant film melting, confined between two atomically-flat solid surfaces, is built using the Landau phase transition approach. Non-equilibrium entropy is introduced describing the part of thermal…
Several experiments have reported that ferroelectric nanoparticles have drastic effects on nematic liquid crystals--increasing the isotropic-nematic transition temperature by about 5 K, and greatly increasing the sensitivity to applied…
McMillan liquid crystal model sandwiched between strong homeotropic anchoring walls is studied. Phase transitions between isotropic, nematic, and smectic A phases are investigated for wide ranges of an interaction parameter and of the…
There is considerable interest in understanding and controlling topological defects in nematic liquid crystals (LCs). Confinement, in the form of droplets, has been particularly effective in that regard. Here, we employ the Landau-de Gennes…
We mathematically model Smectic-A (SmA) phases with a modified Landau-de Gennes (mLdG) model. The orientational order of the SmA phase is described by a tensor-order parameter $\mathbf{Q}$, and the positional order is described by a real…
We study the spontaneous breaking of rotational symmetry in the helical surface state of three-dimensional topological insulators due to strong electron-electron interactions, focusing on time-reversal invariant nematic order. Owing to the…
We study the equilibrium configuration of a nematic liquid crystal bounded by a rough surface. The wrinkling of the surface induces a partial melting in the degree of orientation. This softened region penetrates the bulk up to a length…
We consider a nematic liquid crystal occupying the exterior region in R^3 outside of a spherical particle, with radial strong anchoring. Within the context of the Landau-de Gennes theory, we study minimizers subject to a strong external…
We present a novel mechanism for the anomalous behaviour of the specific heat in low-temperature amorphous solids. The analytic solution of a mean-field model belonging to the same universality class as high-dimensional glasses, the…
Nematic solids respond strongly to changes in ambient heat or light, significantly differently parallel and perpendicular to the director. This phenomenon is well characterized for uniform director fields, but not for defect textures. We…
We studied the nematic isotropic phase transition by applying the functional renormalization group to the Landau-de Gennes model. We derived the flow equations for the effective potential as well as the cubic and quartic "couplings" and the…
A theory for the microscopic structure and the vibrational properties of soft sphere glass at finite temperature is presented. With an effective potential, derived here, the phase diagram and vibrational properties are worked out around the…
The structure of the 3-dimension pressure-temperature-asymmetry surface of equilibrium of the asymmetric nuclear matter is studied within the thermal Thomas-Fermi approximation. Special attention is paid to the difference of the asymmetry…
A critical end point above which an isotropic phase continuously evolves into a polar (ferroelectric) nematic phase with an increasing electric field is found in a ferroelectric nematic liquid crystalline material. The critical end point is…
We present an investigation on effect of the ion-neutral (or ambipolar) diffusion heating rate on thermal phases of a molecular cloud. We use the modeling of ambipolar diffusion with two-fluid smoothed particle hydrodynamics, as discussed…