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Nematic elastomers and glasses deform spontaneously when subjected to temperature changes. This property can be exploited in the design of heterogeneously patterned thin sheets that deform into a non-trivial shape when heated or cooled. In…
Thin dielectric elastomers with compliant electrodes exhibit various types of instability under the action of electromechanical loading. Guided by the thermodynamically-based formulation of Fosdick and Tang (J. Elasticity 88, 255-297,…
Linear defects such as dislocations and disclinations in ordered materials attract foreign particles since they replace strong elastic distortions at the defect cores. In this work, we explore the behavior of isotropic droplets nucleating…
Modeling liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) at the molecular level is crucial for the predictable design of energy-conversion and stimuli-responsive materials. Here, we develop a self-consistent field theory for LCEs which captures the…
Elastic moduli of liquid crystals, known as Frank constants, are of quintessential importance for understanding fundamental properties of these materials and for the design of their applications. Although there are many methods to measure…
Motivated by problems arising in tear film dynamics, we present a model for the extensional flow of thin sheets of nematic liquid crystal. The rod-like molecules of these substances impart an elastic contribution to its response. We rescale…
We model within the framework of finite elasticity two inherent instabilities observed in liquid crystal elastomers under uniaxial tension. First is necking which occurs when a material sample suddenly elongates more in a small region where…
Motivated by recent experimental observations [U. Delabre et al, Langmuir 24, 3998, 2008] we reconsider an instability of ultrathin nematic films, spread on liquid substrates. Within a continuum elastic theory of liquid crystals, in the…
Athermal elongated particles are well-known to follow Jeffery orbits when sheared in viscous fluids. It is less clear if similar orbits appear in dense granular flows. We show that when sheared for long enough, sufficiently elongated…
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…
In the present study, we have studied the electro-hydrodynamic of a physical system where a Newtonian dielectric liquid column or droplet suspended in another Newtonian dielectric liquid medium in presence of a simple shear flow. Taking…
We stabilize nematic droplets with handles against surface-tension-driven instabilities using a yield-stress material as outer fluid and study the complex nematic textures and defect structures that result from the competition between…
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…
We reconsider the classical problem of a freely joined chain of Brownian particles connected by elastic springs and study its conformational probability distribution function in the overdamped regime in the limit of infinite stiffness of…
The spontaneous breaking of time-translation symmetry in periodically driven quantum systems leads to a new phase of matter: discrete time crystals (DTC). This phase exhibits collective subharmonic oscillations that depend upon an interplay…
Anomalous Hall crystals (AHCs) are exotic phases of matter that simultaneously break continuous translation symmetry and exhibit the quantum anomalous Hall effect. AHCs have recently been proposed to explain the observation of an integer…
A fundamental idea in wave mechanics is that propagation in a periodic medium can be described by Bloch waves whose conserved crystal momenta define their transformations when displaced by the set of discrete lattice translations. In…
We analyze the fluctuations in particle positions and inter-particle forces in disordered jammed crystals in the limit of weak disorder. We demonstrate that such athermal systems are fundamentally different from their thermal counterparts,…
The effect of disorder on flux lattices at equilibrium is studied quantitatively in the absence of free dislocations using both the Gaussian variational method and the renormalization group. Our results for the mean square relative…
Anisotropic fluids appear in a diverse array of systems, from liquid-crystal displays to bacterial swarms, and are characterized by orientational order. Large colloidal particles immersed in such environments disturb the medium's…