Related papers: Explosive electrostatic instability of ferroelectr…
Spontaneous electric polarization of solid ferroelectrics follows aligning directions of crystallographic axes. Domains of differently oriented polarization are separated by domain walls (DWs), which are predominantly flat and run along…
Ferroelectric nematic fluids are promising materials for tunable nonlinear photonics, with applications ranging from second harmonic generation to sources of entangled photons. However, the few reported values of second-order…
We report the dynamics of a droplet levitated in a single-axis acoustic levitator. The deformation and atomization behavior of the droplet in the acoustic field exhibits a myriad of complex phenomena, in sequences of steps. These include…
Colloidal particles dispersed in a partially ordered medium, such as a liquid crystal (LC) phase, disturb its alignment and are subject to elastic forces. These forces are long-ranged, anisotropic and tunable through temperature or external…
Previous experimental studies have shown that when a layer of solid particles is explosively dispersed, the particles often develop a non-uniform spatial distribution. The instabilities within the particle bed and at the particle layer…
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…
The dispersion relation of vertically oscillating fluid surfaces has been a subject extensively studied in the past, as well as surface instabilities produced by electrohydrodynamic (EHD) waves in similar configurations. In the present work…
Field theories predict that phase transitions sequentially breaking continuous and discrete symmetries can generate hybrid topological structures in which defects of different dimensionalities merge. We report experimental and numerical…
Controlling the motion of non-Newtonian drops on surfaces is crucial for applications ranging from inkjet printing to biomedical devices and food processing. While the macroscopic behavior of viscoelastic drops sliding on tilted hydrophobic…
We consider a horizontal ferrofluid layer sandwiched between two layers of immiscible non-magnetic fluids. In a sufficiently strong vertical magnetic field the flat interfaces between magnetic and non-magnetic fluids become unstable to the…
We studied dielectric properties of a polar nematic phase (NF) sandwiched between two gold or ITO electrodes, serving as a cell surfaces. In bulk, NF is expected to exhibit a Goldstone mode (phason), because polarization can uniformly…
Antiferroelectric liquid crystals can be considered as a promising alternative to nematic mixtures in the area of microdisplays. Switching behaviour of the molecules has been modelled as two adjacent smectic layers. However, some studies…
Numerous measurements of the dielectric constant $\epsilon$ of the recently discovered ferroelectric nematic ($N_F$) liquid crystal (LC) phase report extraordinarily large values of $\epsilon^\prime$ (up to ~30,000). We show that what is in…
Strong effects of the Faraday instability on suspensions of rodlike colloidal particles are reported through measurements of the critical acceleration and of the surface wave amplitude. We show that the transition to parametrically excited…
We have carried out a spectroscopic study on a prototype ferroelectric nematic material (RM7343) doped with a non-polar chiral compound. The mixture presents two chiral nematic phases, one conventional (N*) and the other polar (NF*), whose…
Bounded charges induced by the polarization gradient in finite-size ferroelectrics are known to produce the unfavorable depolarization electric field that suppresses the uniform ferroelectric state. To reduce the depolarization energy the…
Pyroelectricity refers to the accumulation of charges due to changes in the spontaneous polarization of ferroelectric materials when subjected to temperature variations. Typically, these pyroelectric charges are considered unstable and…
We present a method of measuring the charge density on dielectric surfaces. Similar to electrostatic force microscopy we record the electrostatic interaction between the probe and the sample surface, but at large tip-sample distances. For…
Ferroelectricity is usually found in compound materials composed by different elements. Here, based on first-principles calculations, we reveal the first example of spontaneous electrical polarization and ferroelectricity in stable…
The spontaneous motion of liquid droplets on solid surfaces is the result of an unbalanced surface tension force, which is sometimes called the "Marangoni effect". This can be triggered by either a difference in surface temperature or a…