Related papers: Generalized Director Approach for Liquid-Crystal-B…
The article presents a straightforward experiment that directly and illustratively demonstrates double refraction. For this purpose, two liquid crystalline cells were designed, which enable qualitative and quantitative measurements of the…
A method for the calculation of elastic constants in the NVT ensamble, using molecular dynamics (MD) simulation with a realistic many-body embedded-atom-model (EAM) potential, is studied in detail. It is shown that in such NVT MD…
We describe a real-space approach to the calculation of the properties of an insulating crystal in an applied electric field, based on the iterative determination of the Wannier functions (WF's) of the occupied bands. It has been recently…
Liquid crystal elastomers contract along their director on heating and recover on cooling, offering great potential as actuators and artificial muscles. If a flat sheet is programmed with a spatially varying director pattern, it will…
Using the classical density functional theory of freezing and Monte Carlo computer simulations, we explore the liquid-crystalline phase behavior of hard rectangles on flat and cylindrical manifolds. Moreover, we study the effect of a static…
Linear defects such as dislocations and disclinations in ordered materials attract foreign particles since they replace strong elastic distortions at the defect cores. In this work, we explore the behavior of isotropic droplets nucleating…
Density functional theories such as the Poniewierski-Stecki theory relate the elastic properties of nematic liquid crystals with their local liquid structure, i.e., with the direct correlation function (DCF) of the particles. We propose a…
We study the switching dynamics in two-domain and four-domain twisted nematic liquid crystal devices. The equilibrium configuration of these devices involves the coexistence of regions characterised by different handedness of the inherent…
The guest-host liquid crystal display, first proposed in 1968, relies on controlling the orientation of dichroic dyes dissolved in a nematic liquid crystal host. Controlling the orientation of the liquid crystal and of the dissolved dye…
We propose an approach to measure surface elastic constants of soft solids. Generally, this requires one to probe interfacial mechanics at around the elastocapillary length scale, which is typically microscopic. Deformations of microscopic…
Confining a liquid crystal imposes topological constraints on the orientational order, allowing global control of equilibrium systems by manipulation of anchoring boundary conditions. In this article, we investigate whether a similar…
Nematic elastomers and glasses deform spontaneously when subjected to temperature changes. This property can be exploited in the design of heterogeneously patterned thin sheets that deform into a non-trivial shape when heated or cooled. In…
We propose a simple and reliable method to measure the liquid crystal surface anchoring strength by molecular simulation. The method is based on the measurement of the long-range fluctuation modes of the director in confined geometry. As an…
This paper deals with the formulation and numerical implementation of a fully coupled continuum model for deformation-diffusion in linearized elastic solids. The mathematical model takes into account the effect of the deformation on the…
In this paper we present a generalization of Berreman's model for the elastic contribution to the surface free-energy density of a nematic liquid crystal in presence of a sawtooth substrate which favours homeotropic anchoring, as a function…
Discrete models of dislocations in cubic crystal lattices having one or two atoms per unit cell are proposed. These models have the standard linear anisotropic elasticity as their continuum limit and their main ingredients are the elastic…
Regularization methods improve the stability of ill-posed inverse problems by introducing some a priori characteristics for the solution such as smoothness or sharpness. In this contribution, we propose a multidimensional, scale-dependent…
A novel dielectric scheme is proposed for strongly coupled electron liquids that handles quantum mechanical effects beyond the random phase approximation level and treats electronic correlations within the integral equation theory of…
In a nematic gel, the appearance of nematic order is accompanied by a spontaneous elongation of the gel parallel to the nematic director. If such a gel is made chiral, it has a tendency to form a cholesteric helical texture, in which local…
Standard methods in computer model calibration treat the calibration parameters as constant throughout the domain of control inputs. In many applications, systematic variation may cause the best values for the calibration parameters to…