Related papers: Cooling a spherical nematic shell
We develop a rigorous, field-theoretical approach to the study of spontaneous emission in inertial and dissipative nematic liquid crystals, disclosing an alternative application of the massive Stueckelberg gauge theory to describe critical…
The dynamics of phase transitions plays a crucial r\^ole in the so-called interface between high energy particle physics and cosmology. Many of the interesting results generated during the last fifteen years or so rely on simplified…
We present the results of a Molecular Dynamics computer simulation of a binary Lennard-Jones liquid confined in a narrow pore. The surface of the pore has an amorphous structure similar to that of the confined liquid. We find that the…
Recent progress in the synthesis and processing of nano-structured materials and systems calls for an improved understanding of thermal properties on small length scales. In this context, the question whether thermodynamics and, in…
We introduce shape fluctuations in a liquid-crystalline system by considering an elementary Maier--Saupe lattice model for a mixture of uniaxial and biaxial molecules. Shape variables are treated in the annealed (thermalized) limit. We…
We use large-scale molecular dynamics simulations to study the kinetics of the liquid-gas phase separation if the temperature is lowered across the glass transition of the dense phase. We observe a gradual change from phase separated…
This investigation extends earlier studies of a shear-transformation-zone (STZ) theory of plastic deformation in amorphous solids. My main purpose here is to explore the possibility that the configurational degrees of freedom of such…
The emergence of new techniques for the fabrication of nematic droplets with nontrivial topology provides new routes for the assembly of responsive devices. Here we perform a numerical study of spherical nematic droplets on fibres. We…
We study the effect of thermalization on the rigidity of a randomly packed soft repulsive sphere system around the jamming point by analyzing the shear-modulus using the cloned liquid theory with the 1 step replica symmetry breaking ansatz…
We study random close packed systems of magnetic spheres by Monte Carlo simulations in order to estimate their phase diagram. The uniaxial anisotropy of the spheres makes each of them behave as a single Ising dipole along a fixed easy axis.…
Heating a solid sphere at the surface induces mechanical stresses inside the sphere. If a finite amount of heat is supplied, the stresses gradually disappear as temperature becomes homogeneous throughout the sphere. We show that before this…
Scaled particle theory for a binary mixture of hard discorectangles and for a binary mixture of hard rectangles is used to predict possible liquid-crystal demixing scenarios in two dimensions. Through a bifurcation analysis from the…
We find in a model system of thermotropic liquid crystals that the translational diffusion coefficient parallel to the director $D_{\parallel}$ first increases and then decreases as temperature drops through the nematic phase, and this…
Motivated by the dynamics within terrestrial bodies, we consider a rotating, strongly thermally stratified fluid within a spherical shell subject to a prescribed laterally inhomogeneous heat-flux condition at the outer boundary. Using a…
This work is dedicated to the study of a supersymmetric quantum spherical spin system with short-range interactions. We examine the critical properties both a zero and finite temperature. The model undergoes a quantum phase transition at…
Recently [3] predicted the existence of an intriguing new phenomenon. It was shown that if temperature is suddenly raised at the surface of a sphere the temperature in the interior initially decreases. The authors of [3] gave a thorough…
Thermalized elastic membranes without distant self-avoidance are believed to undergo a crumpling transition when the microscopic bending stiffness is comparable to $kT$, the scale of thermal fluctuations. Most potential physical…
Nematic liquid crystals exhibit configurations in which the underlying ordering changes markedly on macroscopic length scales. Such structures include topological defects in the nematic phase and tactoids within nematic-isotropic…
We consider the shear flow of well-aligned one-component smectic phases, such as thermotropic smectics and lamellar diblock copolymers, below the critical region. We show that, as a result of thermal fluctuations of the layers, parallel…
We investigate the role of large amplitude sub-critical thermal fluctuations in the dynamics of first order phase transitions. In particular, we obtain a kinetic equation for the number density of sub-critical fluctuations of the…