Related papers: Colloidal Directional Structures at a Nematic Liqu…
We show that the elastic charge of colloids in a nematic liquid crystal can be generated by the vector of external torque. The torque components play the role of two component charge (dyad) and give rise to the Coulomb-like potential, while…
Directional motion is commonly observed in various living active systems, such as bacterial colonies moving through confined environments. In these systems, the dynamics arise from the collective effects of mutual interactions between…
Solitons in liquid crystals are spatially localised stable configuration of the liquid crystal orientational order parameter that exhibit emergent particle-like properties such as mutual interaction, translational motion and reconfigurable…
We investigate the dynamics of colloids at a fluid interface driven by attractive capillary interactions. At submillimeter length scales, the capillary attraction is formally analogous to two-dimensional gravity. In particular it is a…
The interplay between the chirality of many biological molecules and the energy injected at small length-scales as the result of biological processes is at the base of the life of the cells. With the aim of unveiling the connection between…
We develop a formal analogy between configurational stresses in two distinct physical systems, and study the flows that they induce when the configurations of interest include topological de- fects. The two systems in question are…
Molecular dynamics simulations have been performed on pure liquid water, aqueous solutions of sodium chloride, and polymer solutions exposed to a strong external electric field with the goal to gain molecular insight into the structural…
A state of matter in which molecules show a long-range orientational order and no positional order is called a nematic liquid crystal. The best known and most widely used (for example, in modern displays) is the uniaxial nematic, with the…
Polarization flutter, produced by an applied AC electric field drives an equilibrium ferroelectric nematic ($\mathrm{N_F}$) liquid crystal (LC) through a transition into a dissipative active ferroelectric nematic state exhibiting strong…
We review the impact of tetrahedral order on the macroscopic dynamics of bent-core liquid crystals. We discuss tetrahedral order comparing with other types of orientational order, like nematic, polar nematic, polar smectic, and active polar…
Building on the striking similarity between the structure of the spindle during mitosis in living cells and nematic textures in confined liquid crystals, we use a continuum model of two-dimensional nematic liquid crystal droplets, to…
Active matter exhibits striking behaviour reminiscent of living matter and molecular fluids, and has promising applications in drug delivery or mixing at the micron scale. Active colloidal systems provide important models with simple and…
The influence of the molecular structure of the nematic liquid crystal (NLC) on the photoalignment process at the NLC -- polymer interface has been investigated experimentally. NLCs having exclusively phenyl-, or cyclohexane rings in the…
We study the chiral symmetry breaking and metastability of confined nematic lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal (LCLC) with and without chiral dopants. The isotropic-nematic coexistence phase of the LCLC renders two confining geometries:…
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 ability to dictate colloid motion is an important challenge in fields ranging from materials science to living systems. Here, by embedding energy landscapes in confined nematic liquid crystals, we design a versatile platform to define…
The study of granular crystals, metamaterials that consist of closely packed arrays of particles that interact elastically, is a vibrant area of research that combines ideas from disciplines such as materials science, nonlinear dynamics,…
Topological defects are one of the most conspicuous features of liquid crystals. In two dimensional nematics, they have been shown to behave effectively as particles with both, charge and orientation, which dictate their interactions. Here,…
We investigate the evolution of a system of colloidal particles, trapped at a fluid interface and interacting via capillary attraction, as function of the range of the capillary interaction and temperature. We address the collapse of an…
Spontaneous emergence of organized states in materials driven by non-equilibrium conditions is of significant fundamental and technological interest. In many cases, the organized states are complex, hence, with some well-studied exceptions,…