Related papers: Topological Phases and Curvature-Driven Pattern Fo…
Chemical design of block copolymers makes it possible to create polymer vesicles with tunable microscopic structure. Here we focus on a model of a vesicle made of smectic liquid-crystalline block copolymers at zero temperature. The vesicle…
Cholesteric elastomers possess a macroscopic ``phase chirality'' as the director n rotates in a helical fashion along an optical axis $z$ and can be described by a chiral order parameter. This parameter can be tuned by changing the helix…
Cholesteric liquid crystals experience geometric frustration when they are confined between surfaces with anchoring conditions that are incompatible with the cholesteric twist. Because of this frustration, they develop complex topological…
We numerically study the dynamic behavior under a symmetric shear flow of selected examples of concentrated phase emulsions with multi-core morphology confined within a microfluidic channel. A variety of new nonequilibrium steady states is…
Constructing systems that exhibit time-scales much longer than those of the underlying components, as well as emergent dynamical and collective behavior, is a key goal in fields such as synthetic biology and materials self-assembly.…
Liquid crystals are assemblies of rod-like molecules which self-organize to form mesophases, in-between ordinary liquids and anisotropic crystals. At each point, the molecules collectively orient themselves along a privileged direction,…
We study the shape, elasticity and fluctuations of the recently predicted (cond-mat/9510172) and subsequently observed (in numerical simulations) (cond-mat/9705059) tubule phase of anisotropic membranes, as well as the phase transitions…
In recent years, higher-order topological phases have attracted great interest in various fields of physics. These phases have protected boundary states at lower-dimensional boundaries than the conventional first-order topological phases…
We study by simulation the physics of two colloidal particles in a cholesteric liquid crystal with tangential order parameter alignment at the particle surface. The effective force between the pair is attractive at short range and favors…
Lyotropic cholesteric liquid crystal phases are ubiquitously observed in biological and synthetic polymer solutions, characterized by a complex interplay between thermal fluctuations, entropic and enthalpic forces. The elucidation of the…
Topologically stable structures include vortices in a wide variety of matter, such as skyrmions in ferro- and antiferromagnets, and hedgehog point defects in liquid crystals and ferromagnets. These are characterized by integer-valued…
We consider director configurations of cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) cells with two plane confining substrates. Exact solutions of the Euler-Lagrange equations for out-of-plane orientations of the easy axes that correspond to…
Building a general theoretical framework to describe the microscopic origin of macroscopic chirality in (colloidal) liquid crystals is a long-standing challenge. Here, we combine classical density functional theory with Monte Carlo…
We investigate through numerical simulations how a two-dimensional crystal yields and flows under an applied shear. We focus over a range that allows us to both address the response in the limit of an infinitesimal shear rate and describe…
A statistical theory of cholesteric liquid crystals composed of short rigid biaxial molecules is presented. It is derived in the thermodynamic limit at a small density and a small twist. The uniaxial (biaxial) cholesteric phase is regarded…
The recently discovered three dimensional or bulk topological insulators are expected to exhibit exotic quantum phenomena. It is believed that a trivial insulator can be twisted into a topological state by modulating the spin-orbit…
With the rapid development of topological states in crystals, the study of topological states has been extended to quasicrystals in recent years. In this review, we summarize the recent progress of topological states in quasicrystals,…
The surface alignment of lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals (LCLCs) can be not only planar (tangential) but also homeotropic, with self-assembled aggregates perpendicular to the substrate, as demonstrated by mapping optical retardation and…
Rod-like objects at high packing fractions can form smectic phases, where the rods break rotational and translational symmetry by forming lamellae. Smectic defects thereby include both discontinuities in the rod orientational order…
Two nematic shells brought in contact coalesce in order to reduce their interfacial tension. This process proceeds through the creation of a liquid neck-like bridge through which the encapsulated fluid flows. Following this topological…