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Motile living organisms routinely probe their surroundings to adapt in ever-evolving environments. Although synthetic microswimmers offer surrogates for self-propelled living entities, they often lack the complex feedback mechanisms that…
The geometric shape, symmetry, and topology of colloidal particles often allow for controlling colloidal phase behavior and physical properties of these soft matter systems. In liquid crystalline dispersions, colloidal particles with low…
We study a diffuse interface model describing the complex rheology and the interfacial dynamics during phase separation in a polar liquid-crystalline emulsion. More precisely, the physical systems comprises a two-phase mixture consisting in…
A nematic liquid crystal confined to the surface of a sphere exhibits topological defects of total charge $+2$ due to the topological constraint. In equilibrium, the nematic field forms four $+1/2$ defects, located at the corners of a…
Suspensions of actively driven anisotropic objects exhibit distinctively nonequilibrium behaviors, and current theories predict that they are incapable of sustaining orientational order at high activity. By contrast, here we show that…
We introduce a density-functional formalism based on the Parsons-Lee and the generalized van der Waals theories in order to describe the thermodynamics of anisotropic particle systems with steric interactions. For ellipsoids of revolution,…
Real-life bacteria often swim in complex fluids, but our understanding of the interactions between bacteria and complex surroundings is still evolving. In this work, rod-like \textit{Bacillus subtilis} swims in a quasi-2D environment with…
The common description of the electrical behavior of a nematic liquid crystal as an anisotropic dielectric medium with (weak) ohmic conductivity is extended to an electrodiffusion model with two active ionic species. Under appropriate, but…
The nonlinear elastic properties of nematic liquid crystals have acquired new interest with the recent experimental observation of bulk modulated nematic phases which are composed by achiral molecules. We extend the Oseen-Zocher-Frank's…
Using computer simulations we investigate the microscopic structure of the singular director field within a nematic droplet. As a theoretical model for nematic liquid crystals we take hard spherocylinders. To induce an overall topological…
A continuum theory is employed to numerically study the equilibrium orientation and defect structures of a circular cylindrical particle with flat ends under a homeotropic anchoring condition in a uniform nematic medium. Different aspect…
When an ensemble of particles interact hydrodynamically, they generically display large-scale transient structures such as swirls in sedimenting particles [1], or colloidal strings in sheared suspensions [2]. Understanding these…
The general Ericksen-Leslie system for the flow of nematic liquid crystals is reconsidered in the non-isothermal case aiming for thermodynamically consistent models. The non-isothermal model is then investigated analytically. A fairly…
Liquid crystals in two dimensions undergo a first-order isotropic-to-quasi-nematic transition, provided the particle interactions are sufficiently ``sharp and narrow''. This implies phase coexistence between isotropic and quasi-nematic…
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…
From incompressible flows to electrostatics, harmonic functions can provide solutions to many two-dimensional problems and, similarly, the director field of a planar nematic can be determined using complex analysis. We derive a closed-form…
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…
We introduce a new class of non-isothermal models describing the evolution of nematic liquid crystals and prove their consistency with the fundamental laws of classical Thermodynamics. The resulting system of equations captures all…
The flow of a liquid crystal around a particle does not only depend on its shape and the viscosity coefficients but also on the direction of the molecules. We studied the resulting drag force on a sphere moving in a nematic liquid crystal…
Colloidal particles in a liquid crystal (LC) behave very differently from their counterparts in isotropic fluids. Elastic nature of the orientational order and surface anchoring of the director cause long-range anisotropic interactions and…