Related papers: Acousto-microfluidic Control of Liquid Crystals
Pure liquids in thermodynamic equilibrium are structurally homogeneous. In liquid crystals, flow and light pulses are used to create reconfigurable domains with polar order. Moreover, through careful engineering of concerted microfluidic…
Consideration is given to the effects of inhomogeneous shear flow (both regular and chaotic) on nematic liquid crystals in a planar geometry. The Landau--de Gennes equation coupled to an externally-prescribed flow field is the basis for the…
Liquid crystals have attracted enormous interest because of the variety of their phases and richness of their application. The interplay of general physical symmetries and specific molecular features generates a myriad of different…
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…
The structure of a molecular liquid, in both the nematic liquid crystalline and isotropic phases, around a cylindrical macroparticle, is studied using density functional theory. In the nematic phase the structure of the fluid is highly…
We investigate dynamic magneto-optic effects in a ferromagnetic nematic liquid crystal experimentally and theoretically. Experimentally we measure the magnetization and the phase difference of the transmitted light when an external magnetic…
A rigorous theory of liquid-crystal transitions is developed starting from the Liouville equation. The starting point is an all-atom description and a set of order parameter field variables that are shown to evolve slowly via Newton's…
We harness the momentum of light resonating inside a micro-droplet cavity, to experimentally generate micro-flows within the envelope of the drop. We 3D map these optically induced flows by using fluorescent nanoparticles; which reveals…
One objective of active matter science is to unveil principles by which chaotic microscale dynamics could be transformed into useful work. A nematic liquid crystal environment offers a number of possibilities, one of which is a directional…
An all-optically driven strategy to govern a liquid crystalline collective molecular nonlinear oscillator is discussed. It does not require external feedbacks of any kind while the oscillator and a time-depending perturbation both are…
The study of hydrodynamics of liquid crystal leads to many fasci- nating mathematical problems, which has prompted various interesting works recently. This article reviews the static Oseen-Frank theory and surveys some recent progress on…
The development of a general theoretical framework for describing the behaviour of a crystal driven far from equilibrium has proved difficult1. Microfluidic crystals, formed by the introduction of droplets of immiscible fluid into a…
We derive a mathematical model of a nematic electrolyte based on a variational formulation of nematodynamics. Extending our previous work, we consider a general setup which incorporates dielectric anisotropy of the liquid-crystalline matrix…
Within the macroscopic Landau-de Gennes approach, we examine the Gaussian normal mode fluctuations of semi-infinite nematic liquid crystals in a regime of critical wetting. It is argued that surface free-energy potentials that strongly…
A continuum density-field formulation with particle-scale resolution is constructed to simultaneously incorporate the orientation dependence of interparticle interactions and the rotational invariance of the system, a fundamental but…
Under non-periodic boundary conditions, we consider the long-time behavior for stochastic 2D nematic liquid crystals flows with velocity and orientations perturbed by additive noise and multiplicative noise respectively. It is the first…
Liquid crystals (LCs) play a fundamental and significant role in modern technology. Recently, they have also been used in active switching, adaptive optics, and next-generation displays for augmented and virtual reality. This is due to the…
In Nature, liquids often circulate in channels textured with leaflets, cilia or porous walls that deform with the flow. These soft structures are optimized to passively control flows and inspire the design of novel microfluidic and soft…
Nematic liquid crystals exhibit both crystal-like and fluid-like features. In particular, the propagation of an acoustic wave shows an unexpected occurrence of some of the solid-like features at the hydrodynamic level, namely, 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…