Related papers: Walk ferroelectric liquid droplets with light
Polarons play a major role in the description of optical, electrical and dielectrical properties of several ferroelectric oxides. The motion of those particles occur by elementary hops among the material lattice sites. In order to compute…
In culture migrating and interacting amoeboid cells can form nematic liquid crystal phases. A polar nematic liquid crystal is formed if the interaction has a polar symmetry. One type of white blood cells (granulocytes) form clusters where…
Ferroelectricity is characterized by the presence of spontaneous and switchable macroscopic polarization. Scaling limits of ferroelectricity have been of both fundamental and technological importance, but the probes of ferroelectricity have…
We report an experimental investigation of the spontaneous motion of liquid droplets on soft gels with a crosslinking gradient. By systematically adjusting the spatial difference in crosslinking density, we observed that millimeter-sized…
Vertical ferroelectricity where a net dipole moment appears as a result of in-plane ionic displacements has gained enormous attention following its discovery in transition metal dichalcogenides. Based on first-principles calculations, we…
Electrical modulation and switching of photoluminescence (PL) have been demonstrated in pure deformed helix ferroelectric liquid crystal (DHFLC) material. The PL intensity increases and peak position shifts towards lower wavelength above a…
We investigate fluids of dipolar hard particles by a certain variant of density-functional theory. The proper treatment of the long range of the dipolar interactions yields a contribution to the free energy which favors ferromagnetic order.…
Liquid transport in microchip-based systems is important in many areas such as Laboratory-on-a-chip, Microfluidics and Optofluidics. Actuation of liquids in such systems is usually achieved using either mechanical displacement11 or via…
Nanodroplets on chemically structured substrates move under the action of disjoining pressure induced forces. A detailed analysis of them shows that even in the absence of long-ranged lateral variations of the effective interface potential,…
Motile liquid crystal (LC) colloids show peculiar behavior due to the high sensitivity to external stimuli driven by the LC elastic and surface effects. However, few studies focus on harnessing the LC phase transitions to propel colloidal…
We show that development of polar order may spontaneously destroy the lamellar structure of a liquid crystal. This results in an unusual sequence of phases with the ferroelectric nematic phase appearing below a non-polar smectic phase. The…
An unresolved issue in the theory of liquid crystals is the molecular basis of the electroclinic effect in the smectic-A phase. Recent x-ray scattering experiments suggest that, in a class of siloxane-containing liquid crystals, an electric…
Mesoscopic hydrodynamic equations are solved to investigate the dynamics of nanodroplets positioned near a topographic step of the supporting substrate. Our results show that the dynamics depends on the characteristic length scales of the…
Chiral nematic liquid crystals are one-dimensional photonic band-gap materials whose reflection wavelength can be well tuned by temperature, but only limited and irreversible tuning can be achieved by electric fields. In contrast, oblique…
The orientational and translational order of a thermotropic ferroelectric liquid crystal (2MBOCBC) imbibed in self-organized, parallel, cylindrical pores with radii of 10, 15, or 20 nm in anodic aluminium oxide monoliths (AAO) are explored…
We reported a phenomenon that when exerting an electric field gradient across a liquid metal/electrolyte interface, a droplet of the same liquid metal can persistently surf on the interface without coalescence. A thin layer of the…
Electric field induced collective reorientation of nematic molecules placed between two flat parallel electrodes is of importance for both fundamental science and practical applications. This reorientation is either homogeneous over the…
The electrical conductivity of parallel plate capacitors, with ferroelectric lithium niobate as the dielectric layer, can be extensively and progressively modified by the controlled injection of conducting domain walls. Domain wall-based…
Conventional perovskite-type ferroelectrics are based on octahedral units of oxygen, and often comprise toxic Pb to achieve robust ferroelectricity. Here, we report the ferroelectricity in a silicate-based compound, Bi2SiO5 (BSO), induced…
The recent discovery of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking has demonstrated the possibility of discovering the exotic textures of ferromagnetic systems in liquid crystalline fluid ferro-electrics. We show that the polar smectic mesophase…