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Ionic liquid crystals (ILCs) are anisotropic mesogenic molecules which additionally carry charges. This combination gives rise to a complex interplay of the underlying (anisotropic) contributions to the pair interactions. It promises…
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 investigate the interfacial dynamics involved in the impact of a droplet on a liquid-liquid system, which involves the impingement of an immiscible core liquid drop from a vertical separation onto an interfacial shell liquid layer…
Point-like motile topological defects control the universal dynamics of diverse two-dimensional active nematics ranging from shaken granular rods to cellular monolayers. A comparable understanding in higher dimensions has yet to emerge. We…
We present observations of strength one defects and antidefects formed in isotropic-nematic phase transition in a thin layer of nematic liquid crystals, using a cross-polarizer setup. We measure the widths of the distributions of {\it net}…
Nematic liquid crystal (LC) is a partially ordered matter that has been a popular model system for studying a variety of topological behaviors in condensed matter. In this work, utilizing a spontaneously twisting achiral LC, we introduce a…
The breakup of an interface into a cascade of droplets and their subsequent coalescence is a generic problem of central importance to a large number of industrial settings such as mixing, separations, and combustion. We study the breakup of…
Understanding and controlling the director field configuration, shape, and orientation in nematic and cholesteric liquid crystals is of fundamental importance in several branches of science. Liquid crystalline droplets, also known as…
Outermost occupied electron shells of chemical elements can have symmetries resembling that of monopoles, dipoles, quadrupoles and octupoles corresponding to filled s-, p-, d- and forbitals. Theoretically, elements with hexadecapolar outer…
Active fluids are a class of non-equilibrium systems where energy is injected into the system continuously by the constituent particles themselves. Many examples, such as bacterial suspensions and actomyosin networks, are intrinsically…
The twist-bend nematic liquid crystal phase is a three-dimensional fluid in which achiral bent molecules spontaneously form an orientationally ordered macroscopically chiral heliconical winding of molecular scale pitch, in absence of…
Ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals are polar fluids characterized by microscopic orientational ordering and macroscopic spontaneous polarizations. Within these fluids, walls that separate domains of different polarizations are…
Emergence of collective dynamical chirality (CDC) at mesoscopic scales plays a key role in many formation processes of chiral structures in nature, which may also provide possible routines for people to fabricate complex chiral…
The phase behaviour of colloidal dispersions is interesting for fundamental reasons and for technological applications such as photonic crystals and electronic paper. Sedimentation, which in everyday life is relevant from blood analysis to…
Recent theoretical research has developed a general framework to understand director deformations and modulated phases in nematic liquid crystals. In this framework, there are four fundamental director deformation modes: twist, bend, splay,…
Using tools and concepts from contact topology we show that non-vanishing twist implies conservation of the layer structure in cholesteric liquid crystals. This leads to a number of additional topological invariants for cholesteric…
We study a driven system in which interaction between particles causes their directional, coupled movement. In that model system, two particles move alternatingly in time on two coupled chains. Without interaction, both particles diffuse…
Chiral liquid crystals exhibit in-plane spontaneous polarizations, however in their smectic phase the primary order parameter is a tilt vector associated with molecular rotations around the long molecular axis parallel to the director. The…
We study the behaviour of catalytically active droplets in multi-component conserved mixtures affected by noise. Working in the thin interface limit, we analytically determine the state diagram of the system, characterized by multiple…
Orientational and positional ordering properties of liquid crystal monolayers are examined by means of Fundamental-Measure Density Functional Theory. Particles forming the monolayer are modeled as hard parallelepipeds of square section of…