Related papers: Symbiotic Dynamics in Living Liquid Crystals
We demonstrate the generation of diverse material flow regimes in nematic liquid cells as driven by time-variable active surface anchoring, including no-net flow, oscillatory flow, steady flow, and pulsating flow. Specifically, we…
Skyrmions have attracted rapidly growing interest due to their topological properties and unique aspects for potential novel applications such as data storage and soft robotics. They can also serve as key elements for materials by design,…
Colloids are abundant in nature, science and technology, with examples ranging from milk to quantum dots and the "colloidal atom" paradigm. Similarly, liquid crystal ordering is important in contexts ranging from biological membranes to…
Equilibrium self-assembly and conventional materials processing techniques fall far short of mimicking dynamic self-actuating processes that are commonplace throughout biology. To bridge the gap between living and synthetic matter, we study…
We present a lattice Boltzmann algorithm for liquid crystal hydrodynamics. The coupling between the tensor order parameter and the flow is treated consistently allowing investigation of a wide range of non-Newtonian flow behavior. We…
Active crystals are highly ordered structures that emerge from the self-organization of motile objects, and have been widely studied in synthetic and bacterial active matter. Whether collective crystallization phenomena can occur in groups…
We study a simplified system of the original Ericksen--Leslie equations for the flow of nematic liquid crystals. This is a coupled non-parabolic dissipative dynamic system. We show the convergence of global classical solutions to single…
Intense light propagating in a nonlinear medium can generate an ensemble of interacting filaments of light, or spatial solitons. Using nematic liquid crystals, we demonstrate that they undergo a collective behavior typical of complex…
We use linear stability analysis and hybrid lattice Boltzmann simulations to study the dynamical behaviour of an active nematic confined in a channel made of viscoelastic material. We find that the quiescent, ordered active nematic is…
Fluid-structure interactions between active and passive components are important for many biological systems to function. A particular example is chromatin in the cell nucleus, where ATP-powered processes drive coherent motions of the…
Active matter drives its constituent agents to move autonomously by harnessing free energy, leading to diverse emergent states with relevance to both biological processes and inanimate functionalities. Achieving maximum reconfigurability of…
We study experimentally the propagation dynamics and interaction of a pair of mutually incoherent nematicons: spatial optical solitons in nematic liquid crystals. In contrast to earlier studies, we consider a bias-free liquid-crystal cell…
The control of light by light is one of the main aims in modern photonics. In this context, a fundamental cornerstone is the realization of light-written waveguides in real time, resulting in all-optical reconfigurability of communication…
Self organizing anisotropic nematic liquid crystals (LCs) induce self-assembly on quantum dots (QDs) to form one-dimensional chains along the nematic director. Spatial ordering of QDs, achieved in the nematic LC matrix, can be controlled in…
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…
Long-range e.g. Coulomb-like interactions for (quantized) topological charges are observed experimentally in liquid crystals, bringing open question this article is exploring: how far can we take this resemblance with particle physics?…
We find that a Lennard-Jones mixture displays a dynamic phase transition between an active regime and an inactive one. By means of molecular dynamics simulations and of a finite-size study, we show that the space time dynamics in the…
There is a recent interest in studying odd elasticity in soft solids. Current focus has been on simple solids. However, many soft solids are structured and can exhibit nematic elasticity or viscoelasticity. Here we generalize the concept of…
Active matter comprises individual units that convert energy into mechanical motion. In many examples, such as bacterial systems and biofilament assays, constituent units are elongated and can give rise to local nematic orientational order.…
The study of systems with sustained energy uptake and dissipation at the scale of the constituent particles is an area of central interest in nonequilibrium statistical physics. Identifying such systems as a distinct category -- Active…