Related papers: First order alignment transition in an interfaced …
Phase-ordering dynamics in nematic liquid crystals has been the subject of much active investigation in recent years in theory, experiments and simulations. With a rapid quench from the isotropic to nematic phase a large number of…
Continuum models of active nematic gels have proved successful to describe a number of biological systems consisting of a population of rodlike motile subunits in a fluid environment. However, in order to get a thorough understanding of the…
The study of liquid crystals at equilibrium has led to fundamental insights into the nature of ordered materials, as well as to practical applications such as display technologies. Active nematics are a fundamentally different class of…
The effect of confinement on the orientational structure of a nematic liquid crystal model has been investigated by using a version of density-functional theory (DFT). We have focused on the case of a nematic confined by opposing flat…
We introduce a family of two-dimensional lattice models of quasicrystals, using a range of square hard cores together with a soft interaction based on an aperiodic tiling set. Along a low temperature isotherm we find, by Monte Carlo…
In equilibrium hard-rod fluids, and in effective hard-rod descriptions of anisotropic soft-particle systems, the transition from the isotropic (I) phase to the nematic phase (N) is observed above the rod aspect ratio L/D = 3.70 as predicted…
An amalgamate of nematic liquid crystals and active matter, referred to as living liquid crystals, is a promising self-healing material with futuristic applications for targeted delivery of information and micro-cargo. We provide a…
When liquid-crystalline elastomers pass through the isotropic-nematic transition, the orientational order parameter and the elastic strain vary rapidly but smoothly, without the expected first-order discontinuity. This broadening of the…
A nematic liquid crystal in contact with a grating surface possessing an alternating stripe pattern of locally homeotropic and planar anchoring is studied within the Frank--Oseen model. The combination of both chemical and geometrical…
In vivo and in vitro systems of cells and extra-cellular matrix (ECM) systems are well known to form ordered patterns of orientationally aligned fibers. Here, we interpret them as active analogs of the (disordered) isotropic to the…
Using agent-based simulations of self-propelled particles subject to short-range repulsion and nematic alignment we explore the dynamical phases of a dense active material confined to the surface of a sphere. We map the dynamical phase…
Modeling and simulation studies using a high-order Landau-de Gennes type model for the direct isotropic/smectic-A liquid crystal transition are presented showing the existence of meta-stable nematic pre-ordering under certain conditions, in…
Mixtures of nematic liquid crystals and isotropic fluids display a diverse range of phase behaviors, arising from the coupling between orientational order and concentration fluctuations. In this review, we introduce a simplified…
We examine the dynamics of a compressible active nematic liquid crystal on a frictional substrate. When frictional damping dominates over viscous dissipation, we eliminate flow in favor of active stresses to obtain a minimal dynamical model…
The hydrodynamic theory of polar liquid crystals is widely used to describe biological active fluids as well as passive molecular materials. Depending on the `shear-alignment parameter', in passive or weakly active polar fluids under…
We consider a continuum model of active viscoelastic matter, whereby an active nematic liquid-crystal is coupled to a minimal model of polymer dynamics with a viscoelastic relaxation time $\tau_C$. To explore the resulting interplay between…
Recent studies of the phase diagram for spherical, purely repulsive, active particles established the existence of a transition from a liquid-like to a solid-like phase analogous to the one observed in colloidal systems at thermal…
We study the phase transition between the Coulomb liquid and the columnar crystal in the 3D classical dimer model, which was found to be continuous in the O(3) universality class. In addition to nearest neighbor interactions which favor…
Elongated active units cannot spontaneously break rotation symmetry in bulk fluids to form nematic or polar phases. This has led to the image of active suspensions as spontaneously evolving, spatiotemporally chaotic fluids. In contrast, I…
A computational study of morphological instabilities of a two-dimensional nematic front under directional growth was performed using a Landau-de Gennes type quadrupolar tensor order parameter model for the first-order isotropic/nematic…