Related papers: First order alignment transition in an interfaced …
Recent experimental realizations of liquid-liquid phase separation of active liquid crystals have offered an insight into the interaction between phase separation, ubiquitous in soft matter and biology, and chaotic active flows. In this…
I put forward a continuum theory for active nematic gels, defined as fluids or suspensions of orientable rodlike objects endowed with active dynamics, that is based on symmetry arguments and compatibility with thermodynamics. The starting…
Phase transitions and the associated symmetry breaking are at the heart of many physical phenomena. Coupled systems with multiple interacting degrees of freedom provide a fertile ground for emergent dynamics that is otherwise inaccessible…
I show that two-dimensional nematic order in an active fluid film can be stable and long-ranged if exchange of particles and momentum with an ambient three-dimensional fluid is allowed. Number-conserving films present an instability, with a…
We experimentally investigate the nature of 2D phase transitions in a quasi-2D granular fluid. Using a surface decorated with periodically spaced dimples we observe interfacial tension between coexisting liquid and crystal phases.…
The electronic nematic phase occurs when the point-group symmetry of the lattice structure is broken, due to electron-electron interactions. We study a model for the nematic phase on a square lattice with emphasis on the phase transition…
Instabilities of fluid-fluid interfaces are ubiquitous in passive soft matter. Adding activity to the interface or either fluid can dramatically change the stability of the interface. Using experiment and theory, we investigate the…
We numerically study the effect of an active turbulent environment on a passive deformable droplet. The system is simulated using coupled hydrodynamic and nematodynamic equations for nematic liquid crystals with an active stress which is…
We combine numerical and analytical methods to study two dimensional active crystals formed by permanently linked swimmers and with two distinct alignment interactions. The system admits a stationary phase with quasi long range…
This paper is the second in a pair treating a new lattice model for nematic media. In addition to the familiar isotropic (I) and nematically ordered (N) phases, the phase diagram established in the previous paper (Paper I) contains a new,…
The phase transition from the isotropic (I) to nematic (N) liquid crystalline suspension of F-actin of average length $3~\mu$m or above was studied by local measurements of optical birefringence and protein concentration. Both parameters…
Motivated by the observation of highly unstable flowing states in suspensions of microtubules and kinesin, we analyze a model of mutually-propelled filaments suspended in a solvent. The system undergoes a mean-field isotropic-nematic…
We show that a suspension of non-interacting deformable particles subjected to an oscillatory shear flow leads to development of nematic order that arises from the phenomenon of phase synchronization. The synchronized state corresponds to a…
There are deep analogies between the melting dynamics in systems with a first order phase transition and the dynamics from equilibrium in super-cooled liquids. For a class of Ising spin models undergoing a first order transition - namely…
The dynamic phase transitions have been studied, within a mean-field approach, in the kinetic spin-1 Ising model Hamiltonian with arbitrary bilinear and biquadratic pair interactions in the presence of a time varying (sinusoidal) magnetic…
We study the three-dimensional spontaneous flow transition of an active nematic in an infinite slab geometry using a combination of numerics and analytics. We show that it is determined by the interplay of two eigenmodes -- called S- and…
Single crystal nematic elastomers undergo a transition from a strongly ordered phase N to an "isotropic" phase I. We show that: (a) samples produced under tension by the Finkelmann procedure are intrinsically anisotropic and should show a…
At low temperatures, some lattice spin models with simple ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic interactions (for example nearest-neighbour interaction being isotropic in spin space on a bipartite three-dimensional lattice) produce…
The concept of a vestigial nematic order emerging from a "mother" spin or charge density-wave state has been applied to describe the phase diagrams of several systems, including unconventional superconductors. In a perfectly clean system,…
Since a rigorous microscopic treatment of a nematic fluid system based on a pairwise interaction potential is immensely complex we had introduced a simple mean field potential which was a modification of the Maier-Saupe potential in a…