Related papers: Defect-induced electronic smectic state at the sur…
One of the defining features of active nematics is that above a critical activity the quiescent state becomes unstable to a distorted, flowing one. We show that spatial variations in activity can fundamentally change the nature of this…
Deviations of molecular shapes from spherical symmetry may give rise to a variety of novel phenomena, including their dynamic behavior. It has recently been predicted [Mazza \textit{et al}. Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{105}, 227802 (2010)] that…
We present a unified, global perspective on the magnetic properties of strongly disordered electronic systems, with special emphasis on the case where the ground state is metallic. We review the arguments for the instability of the…
We study the formation of an electronic nematic phase characterized by a broken point-group symmetry in interacting fermion systems within the weak coupling theory. As a function of interaction strength and chemical potential, the phase…
It is shown that any defect gives an Ohmic contribution to the damping of any normal mode of the crystal lattice with nonzero wavevector which does not vanish at zero temperature. This explains the large phason damping observed at low…
The study of liquid crystals at equilibrium has led to fundamental insights into the nature of ordered materials, as well as to practical applications such as display technologies. Active nematics are a fundamentally different class of…
We study the kinetics of the nematic-isotropic transition in a two-dimensional liquid crystal by using a lattice Boltzmann scheme that couples the tensor order parameter and the flow consistently. Unlike in previous studies, we find the…
An unresolved issue in the theory of liquid crystals is the molecular basis of the electroclinic effect in the smectic-A phase. Recent x-ray scattering experiments suggest that, in a class of siloxane-containing liquid crystals, an electric…
Chemical transformations, such as ion exchange, are commonly employed to modify nanocrystal compositions. Yet the mechanisms of these transformations, which often operate far from equilibrium and entail mixing diverse chemical species,…
We report results of computer simulations of two-dimensional hard disks confined within a quasi one-dimensional ``hard-wall'' channel, a few atomic radii wide. Starting from a commensurate triangular solid a rescaling of the system size…
While impurity has been known widely to affect phase transitions, the atomistic mechanisms have rarely been disclosed. We directly show in atomic scale how impurity atoms induces the condensation of a representative electronic phase, charge…
Inside the metals, semiconductors, and magnets of our everyday experience, electrons are uniformly distributed throughout the material. By contrast, electrons often form clumpy patterns inside of strongly correlated electronic systems…
The character of the ground state of an antiferromagnetic insulator is fundamentally altered upon addition of even a small amount of charge. The added charges agglomerate along domain walls at which the spin correlations, which may or may…
Topological defects in Bloch bands, such as Dirac points in graphene, and their resulting Berry phases play an important role for the electronic dynamics in solid state crystals. Such defects can arise in systems with a two-atomic basis due…
A nematic membrane is a sheet with embedded orientational order, which can occur in biological cells, liquid crystal films, manufactured materials, and other soft matter systems. By formulating the free energy of nematic films using tensor…
Defects are a ubiquitous feature of ordered media. They have certain universal features, independent of the underlying physical system, reflecting their topological origins. While the topological properties of defects are robust, they…
We demonstrate that the changes in the elastic properties of the FeAs systems, as seen in our resonant ultrasound spectroscopy data, can be naturally understood in terms of fluctuations of emerging nematic degrees of freedom. Both the…
Instabilities are discussed which take place when a nematic liquid crystal (LC) layer, enclosed between a planar reference plate and a photosensitive substrate, is illuminated with polarized light from the reference side ({\it reverse}…
Surface-induced profiles of both nematic and smectic order parameters in a nematic liquid crystal, ranging from an orienting substrate to "infinity", were evaluated numerically on base of an extended Landau theory. In order to obtain a…
Electronic nematic order has been reported in a rich landscape of materials, encompassing not only a range of intertwined correlated and topological phenomena, but also different underlying lattice symmetries. Motivated by these findings,…