Related papers: Probing shapes of microbes using liquid crystal te…
Motivated by recent experiments on the rod-like virus bacteriophage fd, confined to circular and annular domains, we present a theoretical study of structural transitions in these geometries. Using the continuum theory of nematic liquid…
Targeting specific technological applications requires the control of nanoparticle properties, especially the crystalline polymorph. Freezing a nanodroplet deposited on a solid substrate leads to the formation of crystalline structures. We…
Circular dichroism spectroscopy is an essential technique for understanding molecular structure and magnetic materials, but spatial resolution is limited by the wavelength of light, and sensitivity sufficient for single-molecule…
We demonstrate scaffolding of plasmonic nanoparticles by topological defects induced by colloidal microspheres to match their surface boundary conditions with a uniform far-field alignment in a liquid crystal host. Displacing energetically…
Modeling of the red blood cell (RBC) shape is an integral part of the experimental and computer simulation investigations of light scattering by these cells for fundamental studies as well as diagnostic applications in techniques like…
Natural bacterial habitats are often complex fluids with viscoelastic and anisotropic responses to stress; for example, they can take the form of liquid crystals (LCs), with elongated microscopic constituents that collectively align while…
Inkjet-printed liquid crystal (LC) droplets exhibit an intricate spatially-varying birefringence due to their complex internal director configuration. While such anisotropy is often viewed as a drawback when LC droplets are used as…
We propose a theory for a type of apertureless scanning near field microscopy that is intended to allow the measurement of magnetism on a nanometer length scale. A scanning probe, for example a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) tip, is…
We characterize the director structures in electroconvection patterns of nematic liquid crystals by means of polarising microscopy. This study was stimulated by a theory put forward by Rossberg et al. (patt-sol/9701005) who propose a…
Using isobaric Monte Carlo simulations, we map out the entire phase diagram of a system of hard cylindrical particles of length $L$ and diameter $D$, using an improved algorithm to identify the overlap condition between two cylinders. Both…
Physical properties of composite materials can be pre-engineered by controlling their structure and composition at the mesoscale. Yet, approaches for achieving this are limited and rarely scalable. We introduce a new breed of self-assembled…
Predicting the macroscopic chiral behaviour of cholesteric liquid crystals from the microscopic chirality of the particles is highly non-trivial, even when the chiral interactions are purely entropic in nature. Here we introduce a novel…
Liquid crystals formed by acute-angle bent-core (ABC) molecules with a 1,7 naphthalene central core show an intriguing phase behavior with the nematic phase accompanied by poorly understood additional phases. In this work, we characterize…
Morphologies of a vesicle confined in a spherical vesicle were explored experimentally by fast confocal laser microscopy and numerically by a dynamically-triangulated membrane model with area-difference elasticity. The confinement was found…
Confluent populations of elongated cells give rise to ordered patterns seen in nematic phase liquid crystals. We correlate cell elongation and intercellular distance with intercellular alignment using an amorphous spin glass model. We…
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 present a near-infrared K_n-band photometric study of edge-on galaxies with a box/peanut-shaped `bulge'. The morphology of the galaxies is analysed using unsharp masking and fits to the vertical surface brightness profiles, and the…
We examine the structure of compact metal nanoparticles (NPs) forming polyhedral sections of face centered (fcc) and body centered (bcc) cubic lattices, which are confined by facets characterized by highly dense {100}, {110}, and {111}…
Experiments on magnetic nanoparticles in a viscous medium have shown that agglomerates form that display complex shapes. However, most theoretical results predict more simple, ordered shapes, such as single-particle width chains. To account…
The internal cell wall structure of the bacterium Lactobacillus helveticus has been observed in situ in aqueous solution using an atomic force microscope (AFM). The AFM tip was used not only for imaging but presumably to remove mechanically…