Related papers: A Molecular Theory for Liquid Crystal Elastomers: …
In many high temperature superconductors, small orthorhombic distortions of the lattice structure result in surprisingly large symmetry breaking of the electronic states and macroscopic properties, an effect often referred to as nematicity.…
We investigate the connection between the transport properties and the thermodynamics of electronic systems with a tendency to form broken-symmetry mesophases evocative of the physics of liquid crystals. Through a hydrodynamic approach to…
An analysis of the IR absorbance for the segmented functional groups of liquid crystal dimers: mesogen and linker, enabled the orientation order to be determined and information about the dipole interactions in the nematic and twist-bend…
Periodic field patterns of atoms and their charges/spins/orbits emerge in crystals, forming novel states of matter called emergent crystals (ECs). In recent years, they are observed in diverse systems such as skyrmion crystals in…
Randomly disordered (polydomain) liquid crystalline elastomers align under stress. We study the dynamics of stress relaxation before, during and after the Polydomain-Monodomain transition. The results for different materials show the…
When liquid-crystal elastomers are prepared without any alignment, disordered polydomain structures emerge as the materials are cooled into the nematic phase. These polydomain structures have been attributed to quenched disorder in the…
We consider the weakly first order phase transition between the isotropic and ordered phases of nematics in terms of the behavior of topological line defects. Analytical and Monte Carlo results are presented for a new coarse-grained lattice…
Composed of microscopic layers that stack along one direction while maintaining fluid-like positional disorder within layers, smectics are excellent systems for exploring topology, defects and geometric memory in complex confining…
For solving the longstanding materials science problem of correlating elastic properties of a solid material to the formation of cracks we present a new general concept. This concept is applied to the technologically most important cracks…
Upon loading, atomic networks can feature delayed viscoplastic relaxation. However, the effect of composition and structure on such a relaxation remains poorly understood. Herein, relying on accelerated molecular dynamics simulations and…
Spherical microparticles dispersed in nematic liquid crystals have been extensively investigated in the past years. Here, we report experimental studies on the elastic deformation, colloidal interaction and self-assembly of hematite…
The ability of cells to reorganize in response to external stimuli is important in areas ranging from morphogenesis to tissue engineering. Elongated cells can co-align due to steric effects, forming states with local order. We show that…
We show that a flat two dimensional network of connected vertices, when stretched, may deform plastically by producing `pleats'; system spanning linear structures with width comparable to the lattice spacing, where the network overlaps on…
A generalized model taking into account the photoisomerization influence on the nematic ordering is presented. This generalized theory is used to investigate the effect of the nonextensivity on the concentration dependence of the long-range…
Lipid membranes are abundant in living organisms, where they constitute a surrounding shell for cells and their organelles. There are many circumstances in which the deformations of lipid membranes are involved in living cells: fusion and…
We demonstrate a variety of ordered patterns, including hexagonal structures and chains, formed by colloidal particles (droplets) at the free surface of a nematic liquid crystal (LC). The surface placement introduces a new type of particle…
A singular potential method in the Q tensor order parameter representation of a nematic liquid crystal is used to study the equilibrium configuration of a disclination dipole. Unlike the well studied isotropic limit (the so called one…
We present a theoretical method for deriving the stress tensor and elastic response of ordered systems within a Ginzburg-Landau type density field theory in the linear regime. This is based on spatially coarse graining the microscopic…
Flexible mechanical metamaterials possess repeating structural motifs that imbue them with novel, exciting properties including programmability, anomalous elastic moduli and nonlinear and robust response. We address such structures via…
We start from a variational model for nematic elastomers that involves two energies: mechanical and nematic. The first one consists of a nonlinear elastic energy which is influenced by the orientation of the molecules of the nematic…