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Smart surfaces that reversibly change the interfacial friction coefficients in response to external stimuli enable a wide range of applications, such as grips, seals, brake pads, packaging films, and fabrics. Here a new concept of such a…
The behavior of thin liquid films is known to be strongly affected by the presence of surfactants at the interfaces. The detailed mechanism by which the latter enhance film stability is still a matter of debate, in particular concerning the…
Photomechanical liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are responsive polymers that can convert light directly into mechanical deformation. This unique feature makes these materials an attractive candidate for soft actuators capable of remote and…
The diffusion process through an ideal polymer network is studied by applying the effective medium theory (EMT) to a lattice-gas model. Polymers are modeled by random walks on the lattice bonds, across which molecules can hop with a certain…
Shaping and steering of light beams is essential in many modern applications, ranging from optical tweezers, camera lenses, vision correction to 3D displays. However, current realisations require increasingly greater tunability and aim for…
We present a theoretical model and experimental demonstration of thin liquid film deformations due to a dielectric force distribution established by surface electrodes. We model the spatial electric field produced by a pair of parallel…
The properties of liquid crystals can be modelled using an order parameter which describes the variability of the local orientation of rod-like molecules. Defects in the director field can arise due to external factors such as applied…
The principal use of photonic crystals is to engineer the photonic density of states, which controls light-matter coupling. We theoretically show that strained 2D photonic crystals can generate artificial electromagnetic fields and highly…
This study presents a Eulerian theory to elucidate the molecular kinematics in polymer networks and their connection to continuum deformation, grounded in fundamental statistical physics and thermodynamics. Three key innovations are…
Using classical density functional theory (DFT) the effect of bringing a liquid crystal (LC) into contact with a porous substrate or matrix is investigated. The DFT used is a combination of the Onsager approximation to evaluate the excess…
When nematic liquid crystals are embedded in random polymer networks, the disordered environment disrupts the long-range order, producing a glassy state. If an electric field is applied, it induces large and fairly temperature-independent…
Landau's phenomenological theory of Fermi liquids is a fundamental paradigm in many-body physics that has been remarkably successful in explaining the properties of a wide range of interacting fermion systems, such as liquid helium-3,…
Crack-templated networks, metallic frameworks fabricated from crack patterns in sacrificial thin films, can exhibit high optical transmittance, high electric conductivity, and a host of other properties attractive for applications. Despite…
Membrane pores are implicated in several critical functions, including cell fusion and the transport of signaling molecules for intercellular communication. However, these structural features are often difficult to probe directly. Droplet…
We examine a reduced membrane model of liquid crystal polymer networks (LCNs) via asymptotics and computation. This model requires solving a minimization problem for a non-convex stretching energy. We show a formal asymptotic derivation of…
Living and engineered systems rely on the stable coexistence of two interspersed liquid phases. Yet surface tension drives their complete separation. Here we show that stable droplets of uniform and tuneable size can be produced through…
Cellular membranes are elastic lipid bilayers that contain a variety of proteins, including ion channels, receptors, and scaffolding proteins. These proteins are known to diffuse in the plane of the membrane and to influence the bending of…
Many organisms have an elastic skeleton that consists of a closed shell of epithelial cells that is filled with fluid, and can actively regulate both elastic forces in the shell and hydrostatic pressure inside it. In this work we introduce…
We present experimental demonstration of electronically tunable metamaterial perfect absorbers in the terahertz regime. By incorporation of active liquid crystal into strategic locations within the metamaterial unit cell we are able to…
Liquid crystals with molecules constrained to the tangent bundle of a curved surface show interesting phenomena resulting from the tight coupling of the elastic and bulk free energies of the liquid crystal with geometric properties of the…