Related papers: Colloidal smectics in button-like confinements: ex…
Curved particles have been shown to stabilize a range of states with unique order in dense suspensions of colloidal bent core liquid crystals. The shape of the colloidal rods encourages the formation of curved director fields. However,…
We analyse a binary mixture of colloidal parallel hard cylindrical particles with identical diameters but dissimilar lengths $L_1$ and $L_2$, with $s=L_2/L_1=3$, confined by two parallel hard walls in a planar slit-pore geometry, using a…
Colloidal crystals are used to understand fundamentals of atomic rearrangements in condensed matter and build complex metamaterials with unique functionalities. Simulations predict a multitude of self-assembled crystal structures from…
Fundamental theories and models of many-body physics can be probed in experiments on ultracold atoms held in place by electromagnetic fields. In particular, of considerable interest are systems under curved confinement, since they can yield…
Recent theories predict that when a supercooled liquid approaches the glass transition, particle clusters with a special "amorphous order" nucleate within the liquid, which lead to static correlations dictating the dramatic slowdown of…
The ordering of rod-like particles in soft, deformable containers emerges from the interplay of anisotropic interactions, geometric confinement, and boundary compliance. This competition couples internal particle organization to container…
We report results of computer simulations of two-dimensional hard disks confined within a quasi one-dimensional ``hard-wall'' channel, a few atomic radii wide. Starting from a commensurate triangular solid a rescaling of the system size…
We explore spatially localized solitonic configurations of a director field, generated using optical realignment and laser-induced heating, in frustrated chiral nematic liquid crystals confined between substrates with perpendicular surface…
Smectic-A monolayers self-assembled in aqueous solutions of chiral fd viruses and a polymer depletant have been shown to exhibit a variety of structures including large, flat disks and twisted ribbons. The virus particles twist near the…
Many physical systems involve two types of orientational order, which are coupled together. For example, ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals have coupled polar and nematic order, and tilted hexatic phases have coupled polar and hexatic…
The ability to manipulate polar entities with multiple external fields opens exciting possibilities for emerging functionalities and novel applications in spin systems, photonics, metamaterials, and soft matter. Liquid crystals (LCs),…
We study the deformation of a fluctuating crystalline sheet confined between two flat rigid walls as a simple model for layered solids where bonds among atoms {\it within} the same layer are much stronger than those {\it between} layers.…
Liquid crystals formed of bent-core molecules are exotic materials that exhibit the twist-bend nematic phase. This arises when an energetic preference for nonzero local bend distortion is accommodated via twist in the texture, resulting in…
The smectic C (smC) phase represents a unique class of liquid crystal phases characterised by the layered arrangement of molecules with tilted orientations with respect to layer normals. Building upon the real-valued tensorial smectic A…
The effect of cylindrical confinement on the phase behaviour of a system of parallel hard rods is studied using Onsager's second virial theory. The hard rods are represented as hard cylinders of diameter $D$ and length $L$, while the…
The phase behavior of colloidal particles embedded in a binary fluid is influenced by wetting layers surrounding each particle. The free energy of the fluid film depends on its morphology, i.e., on size, shape and connectivity. Under rather…
Morphologies of a vesicle confined in a spherical vesicle were explored experimentally by fast confocal laser microscopy and numerically by a dynamically-triangulated membrane model with area-difference elasticity. The confinement was found…
We simulate a strongly size-disperse hard-sphere fluid confined between two parallel, hard walls. We find that confinement induces crystallization into n-layered hexagonal lattices and a novel honeycomb-shaped structure, facilitated by…
We study the optimal packing of short, hard spherocylinders confined to lie tangential to a spherical surface, using simulated annealing and molecular dynamics simulations. For clusters of up to twelve particles, we map out the changes in…
By means of extensive replica-exchange simulations of generic coarse-grained models for helical polymers, we systematically investigate the structural transitions into all possible helical phases for flexible and semiflexible elastic…