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There is a recent interest in studying odd elasticity in soft solids. Current focus has been on simple solids. However, many soft solids are structured and can exhibit nematic elasticity or viscoelasticity. Here we generalize the concept of…
Colloidal interactions in nematic liquid crystals can be described as interactions between elastic multipoles that depend on particle shape, topology, chirality, boundary conditions and induced topological defects. Here, we describe a…
Liquid crystals are synthetic and biological viscoelastic anisotropic soft matter materials that combine liquid fluidity with crystal anisotropy and find use in optical devices, sensor/actuators, lubrication, super-fibers. Frequently…
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…
Many living and artificial systems show a similar emergent behavior and collective motions on different scales, starting from swarms of bacteria to synthetic active particles, herds of mammals and crowds of people. What all these systems…
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…
The study of liquid crystals at equilibrium has led to fundamental insights into the nature of ordered materials, as well as to practical applications such as display technologies. Active nematics are a fundamentally different class of…
Nematic liquid crystals at rough and fluctuating interfaces are analyzed within the Frank elastic theory and the Landau-de Gennes theory. We study specifically interfaces that locally favor planar anchoring. In the first part we reconsider…
A theoretical analysis is presented of a nematic liquid crystal confined between substrates pat- terned with squares that promote vertical and planar alignment. Two approaches are used to eluci- date the behavior across a wide range of…
In vivo and in vitro systems of cells and extra-cellular matrix (ECM) systems are well known to form ordered patterns of orientationally aligned fibers. Here, we interpret them as active analogs of the (disordered) isotropic to the…
A self-interacting polymer can undergo an orientational ordering transition, depending on the magnitude of the nematic interaction. The effect of embedding such a polymer into a flexible surface on this transition is studied on the…
We study the immersion of a ferromagnetic nanowire within a nematic liquid crystal using a lattice Boltzmann algorithm to solve the full three-dimensional equations of hydrodynamics. We present an algorithm for including a moving boundary,…
Liquid crystal elastomers are special cross-linked polymer materials combining the large elastic deformability of elastomers with the orientational orders of liquid crystals. This model exhibits markedly different phenomena than the liquid…
We consider a two-dimensional lattice model for liquid crystals consisting of long rods interacting via purely hard core interactions, with two allowed orientations defined by the underlying lattice. We rigorously prove the existence of a…
Microbullet particles, cylinders with one blunt and one spherical end, offer a novel platform to study the effects of anisotropy and curvature on colloidal assembly in complex fluids. Here, we disperse microbullets in…
We use molecular dynamics to study the ordering of a nematic liquid crystal around a spherical particle or droplet. Homeotropic boundary conditions and strong anchoring create a hedgehog director configuration on the particle surface and in…
The hydrodynamic stresses created by active particles can destabilise orientational order present in the system. This is manifested, for example, by the appearance of a bend instability in active nematics or in quasi-2-dimensional living…
Liquid crystalline media mediate interactions between suspended particles and confining geometries, which not only has potential to guide patterning and bottom-up colloidal assembly, but can also control colloidal migration in microfluidic…
Activity in nematics drives interfacial flows that lead to preferential alignment that is tangential or planar for extensile systems (pushers) and perpendicular or homeotropic for contractile ones (pullers). This alignment is known as…
An elastic membrane with embedded nematic molecules is considered as a model of anisotropic fluid membrane with internal ordering. By considering the geometric coupling between director field and membrane curvature, the nematic texture is…