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Cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) have a characteristic length scale given by the pitch of the twisted stacking of their constituent rod-like molecules. Under homeotropic anchoring conditions where the molecules prefer to orient…
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…
The complex physics of self-assembly in colloidal crystals on deformable interfaces and surfaces poses interesting possibilities for the designability and synthesis of next-generation metamaterials. The goal of this article is to…
A hydrostatically stressed soft elastic film circumvents the imposed constraint by undergoing a morphological instability, the wavelength of which is dictated by the minimization of the surface and the elastic strain energies of the film.…
We study the linear stability of holographic homogeneous solids (HHS) at finite temperature and in presence of a background shear strain by means of a large scale quasi-normal mode analysis which extends beyond the hydrodynamic limit. We…
We investigate the hydrodynamic stability and the formation of patterns in a continuum model of epithelial layers, able to account for the interplay between mechanical activity, lateral adhesion and the $6-$fold orientational order…
Anomalous Hall crystals (AHCs) are exotic phases of matter that simultaneously break continuous translation symmetry and exhibit the quantum anomalous Hall effect. AHCs have recently been proposed to explain the observation of an integer…
Using a well defined soft model glass in the framework of Molecular Dynamics simulations, the inherent structures are probed by means of a recently developed deformation protocol that aims to capture the Dynamical Heterogeneities (DH), as…
Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI) is widely spread in nature on scales from micrometer up to Galactic one. This instability refers to the growth of perturbation of an interface between two parallel streams of Newtonian fluids with…
Many solid materials and liquid crystals exhibit geometric frustration, meaning that they have an ideal local structure that cannot fill up space. For that reason, the global phase must be a compromise between the ideal local structure and…
Topological defects are crucial to the thermodynamics and structure of condensed matter systems. For instance, when incorporated into crystalline membranes like graphene, disclinations with positive and negative topological charge…
Using density-functional theory in the restricted-orientation approximation, we analyse the liquid-crystal patterns and phase behaviour of a fluid of hard rectangular particles confined in a two-dimensional square nanocavity of side length…
This paper reviews the complex ordered structures induced by chirality in liquid crystals. In general, chirality favors a twist in the orientation of liquid-crystal molecules. In some cases, as in the cholesteric phase, this favored twist…
Liquid crystals formed of bent-core molecules are exotic materials that exhibit the twist-bend nematic phase. This arises when an energetic preference for nonzero local bend distortion is accommodated via twist in the texture, resulting in…
This article revisits the instability of sharp shear interfaces, also called vortex sheets, in incompressible fluid flows. We study the Birkhoff-Rott equation, which describes the motion of vortex sheets according to the incompressible…
Geometric frustration appears in a broad range of systems, generally emerging as disordered ground configurations, thereby impeding understanding of the phenomenon's underlying mechanics. We report on a continuum system featuring locally…
We describe the basic properties and consequences of introducing active stresses, with principal direction along the local director, in cholesteric liquid crystals. The helical ground state is found to be linearly unstable to extensile…
This study examines the stability of a flexible material interface between two fluids of the same viscosity in interaction with a free surface. When the layers are motionless, we provide evidence for the onset of a novel instability by…
Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are soft phase-changing solids that exhibit large reversible contractions upon heating, Goldstone-like soft modes and resultant microstructural instabilities. We heat a planar LCE slab to isotropic, clamp…
We investigate pattern transformations of periodic hydrogel systems that are triggered by swelling-induced structural instabilities. The types of microstructures considered in the present work include single-phase and two-phase voided…