Related papers: Surface-directed Dynamics in Living Liquid Crystal…
Emerging technologies based on liquid crystal (LC) materials increasingly leverage the presence of nanoscale defects, unlike the canonical application of LCs -- LC displays. The inherent nanoscale characteristics of LC defects present both…
Sessile droplets of a ferroelectric nematic liquid crystalline material were exposed to surface electric fields produced by pyroelectric and photogalvanic (photovoltaic) effects in X-cut iron-doped lithium niobate crystals. The resulting…
Coupling between flow and orientation is a central issue in understanding the collective dynamics of active biofilaments and cells. Active stresses generated by motor activity destroy (quasi-)long-range orientational order and induce…
Thanks to their unique properties, nematic liquid crystals feature a variety of mechanisms for light-matter interactions. For continuous-wave optical excitations, the two dominant contributions stem from reorientational and thermal…
Natural bacterial habitats are often complex fluids with viscoelastic and anisotropic responses to stress; for example, they can take the form of liquid crystals (LCs), with elongated microscopic constituents that collectively align while…
We present nonlinear dynamic equations for nematic and smectic $A$ liquid crystals in the presence of an alternating electric field and explain their derivation in detail. The local electric field acting in any liquid-crystalline system is…
Active liquid crystals or active gels are soft materials which can be physically realised e.g. by preparing a solution of cytoskeletal filaments interacting with molecular motors. We study the hydrodynamics of an active liquid crystal in a…
A nematic liquid crystal (NLC) layer with the anisotropy axis modulated at a fixed rate q in the transverse direction is considered. If the layer locally constitutes a half-wave plate, then the thin-screen approximation predicts 100%…
Liquid crystals with molecules constrained to the tangent bundle of a curved surface show interesting phenomena resulting from the tight coupling of the elastic and bulk free energies of the liquid crystal with geometric properties of the…
Mono-layers of stearic and behenic acids deposited with the Langmuir-Blodgett technique, were used as aligning films in nematic liquid crystal cells. During the filling process the liquid crystal adopts a deformed quasi-planar alignment…
We examine the behavior of spherical silica particles trapped at an air-nematic liquid crystal interface. When a strong normal anchoring is imposed, the beads spontaneously form various structures depending on their area density and the…
We demonstrate the generation of diverse material flow regimes in nematic liquid cells as driven by time-variable active surface anchoring, including no-net flow, oscillatory flow, steady flow, and pulsating flow. Specifically, we…
We explore the diffusion dynamics of a Brownian microparticle in a lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal (LCLC). In the planarly oriented nematic phase, the microparticle exhibits levitation and anisotropic two-dimensional diffusion. Upon…
Nematic liquid crystal (LC) molecules adsorbed on two dimensional materials are aligned along the crystal directions of the hexagonal lattice. It was demonstrated that short electric pulses can reorient the aligned LC molecules in the…
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 consider a mathematical model that describes the flow of a Nematic Liquid Crystal (NLC) film placed on a flat substrate, across which a spatially-varying electric potential is applied. Due to their polar nature, NLC molecules interact…
We describe electrophoresis of spherical dielectric particles in a uniformly aligned nematic medium with a negative dielectric anisotropy. A spherical particle that orients the liquid crystal (LC) perpendicularly to its surface moves under…
Nematic liquid-crystal devices are a powerful tool to structure light in different degrees of freedom, both in classical and quantum regimes. Most of these devices exploit either the possibility of introducing a position-dependent phase…
Flagellated microswimmers B. Subtilis dispersed in a nematic phase of a lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal form a living liquid crystal (LLC). The combination of the passive and active components allows us to analyze how the active…
Mono-layers of stearic and behenic acids and mixtures of them in different proportions, deposited with the Langmuir-Blodgett technique, were used to study the alignment and the alignment dynamics in nematic liquid crystal cells. A…