Related papers: Nematic liquid crystals in a rectangular confineme…
The emergence of nematic order on deformable closed surfaces plays a pivotal role in the morphogenesis of active biological matter, such as the regeneration of Hydra. In this work, we present a continuum model that couples the…
Uniaxial nematic liquid crystals whose molecular orientation is subjected to a tangential anchoring on a curved surface offer a non trivial interplay between the geometry and the topology of the surface and the orientational degree of…
The ability to manipulate polar entities with multiple external fields opens exciting possibilities for emerging functionalities and novel applications in spin systems, photonics, metamaterials, and soft matter. Liquid crystals (LCs),…
Building on the striking similarity between the structure of the spindle during mitosis in living cells and nematic textures in confined liquid crystals, we use a continuum model of two-dimensional nematic liquid crystal droplets, to…
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…
We study energy minimization of a continuum Landau-de Gennes energy functional for nematic liquid crystals, in three-dimensional axisymmetric domains and in a restricted class of $\mathbb{S}^1$-equivariant (i.e., axially symmetric)…
We have studied the nucleation and the physical properties of a -1/2 wedge disclination line near the free surface of a confined nematic liquid crystal. The position of the disclination line has been related to the material parameters…
Molecular simulations of a nematic liquid crystal confined in cylinder geometry with homeotropic anchoring have been carried out. The core structure of a disclination line defect of strength +1 has been examined, and comparison made with…
Motivated by experiments in electroconvection in nematic liquid crystals with homeotropic alignment we study the coupled amplitude equations describing the formation of a stationary roll pattern in the presence of a weakly-damped mode that…
We use the method of $\Gamma$-convergence to study the behavior of the Landau-de Gennes model for a nematic liquid crystalline film attached to a general fixed surface in the limit of vanishing thickness. This paper generalizes the approach…
We give a brief introduction to a divergence penalized Landau-de Gennes functional as a toy model for the study of nematic liquid crystal with colloid inclusion, in the case of unequal elastic constants. We assume that the nematic occupies…
We study a modified Landau-de Gennes model for nematic liquid crystals, where the elastic term is assumed to be of subquadratic growth in the gradient. We analyze the behaviour of global minimizers in two- and three-dimensional domains,…
Optical methods are most convenient to analyze spatially periodic patterns with wavevector $\bm q$ in a thin layer of a nematic liquid crystal. In the standard experimental setup a beam of parallel light with a 'short' wavelength $\lambda…
We study the hydrodynamics of compressible active nematic liquid crystals in a three-dimensional and bounded domain, with a nonlinear viscosity tensor and nonhomogeneous boundary data, in a Landau-de Gennes framework. We prove the existence…
We perform a bifurcation analysis of the steady states of Rayleigh--B\'enard convection with no-slip boundary conditions in two dimensions using a numerical method called deflated continuation. By combining this method with an…
We study uniaxial solutions of the Euler-Lagrange equations for a Landau-de Gennes free energy for nematic liquid crystals, with a fourth order bulk potential, with and without elastic anisotropy. In the elastic isotropic case, we show that…
From incompressible flows to electrostatics, harmonic functions can provide solutions to many two-dimensional problems and, similarly, the director field of a planar nematic can be determined using complex analysis. We derive a closed-form…
Active nematic fluids confined in narrow channels generate spontaneous flows when the activity is sufficiently intense. Recently, it was shown that if the molecular anchoring at the channel walls is conflicting flows are initiated even in…
The possible symmetries of the biaxial nematic phase are examined against the implications of the presently available experimental results. Contrary to the widespread notion that biaxial nematics have orthorhombic symmetry, our study shows…
We study stability and distortions of liquid crystal nematic order in a cell with a random heterogeneous substrate. Modeling this system as a bulk xy model with quenched disorder confined to a surface, we find that nematic order is…