Related papers: Shape Morphing of Planar Liquid Crystal Elastomers

We study living liquid crystals (LLCs), which are an amalgam of nematic liquid crystals (LCs) and active matter (AM). These LLCs are placed in contact with surfaces which impose planar/homeotropic boundary conditions on the director field…

What characterises a solid is its way to respond to external stresses. Ordered solids, such crystals, display an elastic regime followed by a plastic one, both well understood microscopically in terms of lattice distortion and dislocations.…

We consider a mathematical model that describes the flow of a Nematic Liquid Crystal (NLC) film placed on a flat substrate, across which a spatially-varying electric potential is applied. Due to their polar nature, NLC molecules interact…

In soft matter, the phase of nematic liquid crystals can be made from anisotropic molecules in single component materials, or as a suspension of mesoscopic nematogens. The later offers more versatility in the experimental design of complex…

Elastomers filled with liquid inclusions -- as opposed to conventional solid fillers -- are a recent trend in the soft matter community because of their unique range of mechanical and physical properties. Such properties stem, in part, from…

On microscopic scales, the crystallinity of flexible tethered or cross linked membranes determines their mechanical response. We show that by controlling the type, number and distribution of defects on a spherical elastic shell, it is…

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…

A liquid crystal optical device made of an optically anisotropic heterostructure is considered. The device consists of a cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) layer sandwiched by two phase-shifting anisotropic layers of a nematic liquid crystal…

Continuum models of active nematic gels have proved successful to describe a number of biological systems consisting of a population of rodlike motile subunits in a fluid environment. However, in order to get a thorough understanding of the…

Finite domains of a Langmuir monolayer in a phase with tilted molecules can be modeled by a simple elastic free energy of an XY order parameter with isotropic and anisotropic line tension terms. The domains can and often do contain…

Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) can undergo large reversible contractions along their nematic director upon heating or illumination. A spatially patterned director within a flat LCE sheet thus encodes a pattern of contraction on heating,…

Dielectric elastomers are an emerging class of highly deformable electro-active materials employed for electromechanical transduction technology. For practical applications, the design of such transducers requires a model accounting for…

Disclination configurations of a nematic liquid crystal are studied within a self-consistent molecular field theory. The theory is based on a tensor order parameter, and can accommodate anisotropic elastic energies without the known…

Surface tension at cavity walls can play havoc with the mechanical properties of perforated soft solids when the cavities are filled with a fluid. This study is an investigation of the macroscopic elastic properties of elastomers embedding…

Exact solutions are derived for the problem of a two-dimensional, infinitely anisotropic, linear-elastic medium containing a periodic lattice of voids. The matrix material possesses either one infinitely soft, or one infinitely hard loading…

We explore micropatterned director structures of aqueous lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal (LCLC) films created on square lattice cylindrical-micropost substrates. The structures are manipulated by modulating the LCLC mesophases and their…

Understanding and controlling the director field configuration, shape, and orientation in nematic and cholesteric liquid crystals is of fundamental importance in several branches of science. Liquid crystalline droplets, also known as…

Macroscale robotic systems have demonstrated great capabilities of high speed, precise, and agile functions. However, the ability of soft robots to perform complex tasks, especially in centimeter and millimeter scale, remains limited due to…

Liquid crystal elastomers are rubbers with liquid crystal order. They contract along their nematic director when heated or illuminated. The shape changes are large and occur in a relatively narrow temperature interval, or at low…

Nematic liquid-crystal devices are a powerful tool to structure light in different degrees of freedom, both in classical and quantum regimes. Most of these devices exploit either the possibility of introducing a position-dependent phase…