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Cells are fundamental building blocks of living organisms displaying an array of shapes, morphologies, and textures that encode specific functions and physical behaviors. Elucidating the rules of this code remains a challenge. In this work,…
Many metastable complex fluids such as colloidal glasses and gels show distinct nonlinear viscoelasticity with increasing oscillatory-strain amplitude; the storage modulus decreases monotonically as the strain amplitude increases whereas…
In this review, we present our recent computational work on carbon-based nanostructured composites. These materials consist of carbon crystallites embedded in an amorphous carbon matrix and are modeled here through classical and…
Crystalline topological insulators have recently become a powerful platform for realizing photonic topological states from microwaves to the visible. Appropriate geometric symmetries of the lattice are at the core of their functionality.…
The extended Frank elastic energy density is used to investigate the existence of a stable periodically modulate structure that appears as a ground state exhibiting a twist-bend molecular arrangement. For an unbounded sample, we show that…
In culture migrating and interacting amoeboid cells can form nematic liquid crystal phases. A polar nematic liquid crystal is formed if the interaction has a polar symmetry. One type of white blood cells (granulocytes) form clusters where…
This article models experimentally observed three dimensional particle-like waves that develop in nematic liquid crystals, with negative dielectric and conductive anisotropy, when subject to an applied alternating electric field. The liquid…
The topology and the geometry of a surface play a fundamental role in determining the equilibrium configurations of thin films of liquid crystals. We propose here a theoretical analysis of a recently introduced surface Frank energy, in the…
Recent progress in approaches to determine the elastic constants of solids starting from the microscopic particle interactions is reviewed. On the theoretical side, density functional theory approaches are discussed and compared to more…
The optical polarimetry technique is used to explore molecular ordering of nematic liquid crystals 5FPFFPP3 embedded in parallel cylindrical channels of alumina membranes with pore walls covered by a SE-1211 polymer film enhancing normal…
We have calculated the phase diagrams of one--component fluids made of five types of biaxial particles differing in their cross sections. The orientation of the principal particle axis is fixed in space, while the second axis is allowed to…
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…
This paper focuses on mechanical aspects of chromatin biological functioning. Within a basic geometric modeling of the chromatin assembly, we give for the first time the complete set of elastic constants (twist and bend persistence lengths,…
We consider the shear flow of well-aligned one-component smectic phases, such as thermotropic smectics and lamellar diblock copolymers, below the critical region. We show that, as a result of thermal fluctuations of the layers, parallel…
This work presents a fast and scalable approach for predicting surface stability and equilibrium crystal morphology in ionic materials using electrostatic analysis. The method constructs stoichiometric slab terminations and evaluates their…
Using density-functional theory, we have analyzed the phase behavior of binary mixtures of hard rods of different lengths and diameters. Previous studies have shown a strong tendency of smectic phases of these mixtures to segregate and, in…
Motivated by recent experiments on the rod-like virus bacteriophage fd, confined to circular and annular domains, we present a theoretical study of structural transitions in these geometries. Using the continuum theory of nematic liquid…
Nematic elastomers are rubbery solids which have liquid crystals incorporated into their polymer chains. These materials display many unusual mechanical properties, one such being the ability to form fine-scale microstructure. In this work,…
Using molecular dynamics simulations, with a realistic many-body embedded-atom potential, and a novel method to characterize local order, we study the structure of pure nickel during the rapid quench of the liquid and in the resulting…
We report experimental studies on optical (birefringence, $\Delta n$), dielectric $(\Delta \varepsilon)$ and bend-splay elastic anisotropies ($\Delta K=K_{33}-K_{11})$ of a few mixtures of two nematic liquid crystals, namely CCH-7 and…