Related papers: A Molecular Theory for Liquid Crystal Elastomers: …
Nematic liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) have anomalously high vibration damping, and it has been assumed this is the cause of their anomalously high pressure-sensitive adhesion (PSA). Here we investigate the mechanism behind this enhanced…
We theoretically investigate the threshold for the director reorientation from the homeotropic state to the hybrid homeotropic-planar state and vice versa in a cell filled with a flexoelectric nematic liquid crystal (NLC) subjected to an…
A Landau theory is constructed for the vulcanization transition in cross-linked polymer systems with spontaneous nematic ordering. The neo-classical theory of the elasticity of nematic elastomers is derived via the minimization of this…
Liquid metals (LM) are embedded in an elastomer matrix to obtain soft composites with unique thermal, dielectric, and mechanical properties. They have applications in soft robotics, biomedical engineering, and wearable electronics. By…
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…
The most profound effect of disorder on the elastic response of solids is the nonaffinity of local displacements whereby the atoms (particles, network junctions) do not simply follow the macroscopic strain, as they do in perfect crystals,…
Using Monte Carlo (MC) computer simulations we explore the self-assembly and ordering behavior of a hybrid, soft magnetic system consisting of small magnetic nano-spheres in a liquid-crystalline (LC) matrix. Inspired by recent experiments…
Spontaneous onset of a low temperature topologically ordered phase in a 2-dimensional (2D) lattice model of uniaxial liquid crystal (LC) was debated extensively pointing to a suspected underlying mechanism affecting the RG flow near the…
We study the kinetics of the nematic-isotropic transition in a two-dimensional liquid crystal by using a lattice Boltzmann scheme that couples the tensor order parameter and the flow consistently. Unlike in previous studies, we find the…
In complex crystals close to melting or at finite temperatures, different types of defects are ubiquitous and their role becomes relevant in the mechanical response of these solids. Conventional elasticity theory fails to provide a…
Viscous flows through configurations manufactured from soft materials apply both pressure and shear stress at the solid-liquid interface, leading to deformation of the cross-section, which affects the flow rate-pressure drop relation.…
We demonstrate that a first order isotropic-to-nematic phase transition in liquid crystals can be succesfully modeled within the generalized Landau-de Gennes theory by selecting an appropriate combination of elastic constants. The numerical…
We theoretically study the nematic ordering transition of rods that are able to elastically adjust their mutually excluded volumes. The model rods, which consist of a hard core surrounded by a deformable shell, mimic the structure of…
Isotropic-genesis nematic elastomers (IGNEs) are liquid crystalline polymers (LCPs) that have been randomly, permanently cross-linked in the high-temperature state so as to form an equilibrium random solid. Thus, instead of being free to…
Necking instabilities, in which tensile (extensional) deformation localizes into a small spatial region, are generic failure modes in elasto-viscoplastic materials. Materials in this very broad class --- including amorphous, crystalline,…
Nematic ordering describes the phenomenon where anisotropic molecules tend to locally align, like matches in a matchbox. This ordering can arise in solids (as nematic elastomers), liquids (as liquid crystals), and in gases. In the 1940s,…
Using molecular dynamics simulations, we provide chain-level insights into the dissimilarities in rearrangements of polymers under uniaxial tensile and compressive deformation in glassy and semicrystalline samples of varying chain lengths.…
We present a Landau type theory for the non-linear elasticity of biopolymer gels with a part of the order parameter describing induced nematic order of fibers in the gel. We attribute the non-linear elastic behavior of these materials to…
We apply the method developed in Ref. [S.B.Chernyshuk and B.I.Lev, Phys.Rev.E, \textbf{81}, 041701 (2010)] for theoretical investigation of colloidal elastic interactions between axially symmetric particles in the confined nematic liquid…
Spatiotemporal patterns in multicellular systems are important to understanding tissue dynamics, for instance, during embryonic development and disease. Here, we use a multiphase field model to study numerically the behavior of a…