Related papers: Paradoxes for Chromonic Liquid Crystal Droplets
Photochromic diarylethene is known to exhibit reversible photoisomerization under irradiation with ultraviolet (UV) and visible light. Besides reversible optical properties upon light irradiation, a variety of discontinuous morphological…
Liquid crystalline polymers are materials of considerable scientific interest and technological value to society [1-3]. An important subset of such materials exhibit rubber-like elasticity; these can combine the remarkable optical…
We investigate solid-solid and solid-liquid transitions of elastic flexible off-lattice polymers with Lennard-Jones monomer-monomer interaction and anharmonic springs by means of sophisticated variants of multicanonical Monte Carlo methods.…
We theoretically investigate the threshold for the director reorientation from the homeotropic state to the hybrid homeotropic-planar state and vice versa in a cell filled with a flexoelectric nematic liquid crystal (NLC) subjected to an…
Aperiodic crystals are the intermediates between strictly periodic crystalline matter and amorphous solids. The lack of translational symmetry combined with intrinsic long-range order endows aperiodic crystals with unique physical…
We present experiments which show that the partial wetting of droplets capped by taut elastic films is highly tunable. Adjusting the tension allows the contact angle and droplet morphology to be controlled. By exploiting these elastic…
Symmetry plays a key role in determining the physical properties of materials. By Neumann's principle, the properties of a material are invariant under the symmetry operations of the space group to which the material belongs. Continuous…
By means of computer simulations we study how droplets of hard, rod-like particles optimize their shape and internal structure under the influence of the osmotic compression caused by the presence of spherical particles that act as…
Topological defects are one of the most conspicuous features of liquid crystals. In two dimensional nematics, they have been shown to behave effectively as particles with both, charge and orientation, which dictate their interactions. Here,…
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…
Emerging technologies based on liquid crystal (LC) materials increasingly leverage the presence of nanoscale defects, unlike the canonical application of LCs -- LC displays. The inherent nanoscale characteristics of LC defects present both…
This article models experimentally observed three dimensional particle-like waves that develop in nematic liquid crystals, with negative dielectric and conductive anisotropy, when subject to an applied alternating electric field. The liquid…
Tactoids are pointed, spindle-like droplets of nematic liquid crystal in an isotropic fluid. They have long been observed in inorganic and organic nematics, in thermotropic phases as well as lyotropic colloidal aggregates. The variational…
Topological defects -- locations of local mismatch of order -- are a universal concept playing important roles in diverse systems studied in physics and beyond, including the universe, various condensed matter systems, and recently, even…
We study the two-dimensional domain morphology of twisted nematic liquid crystals during their phase-ordering kinetics [R. A. L. Almeida, Phys. Rev. Lett. 131 (2023) 268101], which is a physical candidate to self-generate critical clusters…
We address the question of why larger, high symmetry crystals are mostly weak, ductile and statistically sub-critical, while smaller crystals with the same symmetry are strong, brittle and super-critical. We link it to another question of…
In complex crystals close to melting or at finite temperatures, different types of defects are ubiquitous and their role becomes relevant in the mechanical response of these solids. Conventional elasticity theory fails to provide a…
Liquid crystal elastomers are special cross-linked polymer materials combining the large elastic deformability of elastomers with the orientational orders of liquid crystals. This model exhibits markedly different phenomena than the liquid…
Crystalline symmetries give rise to topological invariants that can distinguish quantum phases of matter. Understanding these in strongly interacting systems is an ongoing research direction requiring non-perturbative methods. Recent…
Mono-layers of stearic and behenic acids deposited with the Langmuir-Blodgett technique, were used as aligning films in nematic liquid crystal cells. During the filling process the liquid crystal adopts a deformed quasi-planar alignment…