Related papers: Surface-directed Dynamics in Living Liquid Crystal…
When a nematic liquid crystal (LC) is confined on a self-closing spherical shell, topological constraints arise with intriguing consequences that depend critically on how the LC is aligned in the shell. We demonstrate reversible dynamic…
The evaporation of a droplet induces variety of ordered patterns near the contact line between the droplet and a substrate. This pattern formation involves both the behavior of colloidal suspensions and interactions between a droplet and a…
Understanding the flow of liquid crystals in microfluidic environments plays an important role in many fields, including device design and microbiology. We perform hybrid lattice-Boltzmann simulations of a nematic liquid crystal flowing…
Liquid crystals are assemblies of rod-like molecules which self-organize to form mesophases, in-between ordinary liquids and anisotropic crystals. At each point, the molecules collectively orient themselves along a privileged direction,…
Antiferroelectric liquid crystals can be considered as a promising alternative to nematic mixtures in the area of microdisplays. Switching behaviour of the molecules has been modelled as two adjacent smectic layers. However, some studies…
Topological defects, such as disclination lines in nematic liquid crystals, are fundamental to many physical systems and applications. In this work, we study the behavior of nematic disclinations in thin parallel-plate geometries with…
We investigate dynamic magneto-optic effects in a ferromagnetic nematic liquid crystal experimentally and theoretically. Experimentally we measure the magnetization and the phase difference of the transmitted light when an external magnetic…
A surface in contact with the isotropic phase of a passive liquid crystal can induce nematic order over distances that range from microscopic to macroscopic when the nematic-isotropic interface undergoes an orientational-wetting transition.…
Liquid crystal layers sandwiched between a reference plate and a photosensitive substrate were investigated. We focused on the reverse geometry, where the cell was illuminated by a laser beam from the reference side. In planar cells…
Using experiments and numerical simulations, we demonstrate that the curvature of microscale conduits allow programming of liquid crystal (LC) flows. Focusing on a nematic LC flowing through U- and L-shaped channels of rectangular…
Chiral twisting of the molecular orientation within the layer of a smectic-A liquid crystal has been investigated using circular dichroism spectroscopy. The results indicate that a rotation of the layers away from the alignment direction is…
We present a theory of the dynamics of monatomic liquids built on two basic ideas: (1) The potential surface of the liquid contains three classes of intersecting nearly-harmonic valleys, one of which (the ``random'' class) vastly outnumbers…
In this article, we describe the instability of a contact line under nonequilibrium conditions mainly based on the results of our recent studies. Two experimental examples are presented: the self-propelled motion of a liquid droplet and…
Cell monolayers are a central model system to tissue biophysics. In vivo, epithelial tissues are curved on the scale of microns, and curvature's role in the onset of spontaneous tissue flows is still not well-understood. Here, we present a…
We simulate the liquid silicon surface with first-principles molecular dynamics in a slab geometry. We find that the atom-density profile presents a pronounced layering, similar to those observed in low-temperature liquid metals like Ga and…
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…
Active colloids and liquid crystals are capable of locally converting the macroscopically-supplied energy into directional motion and promise a host of new applications, ranging from drug delivery to cargo transport at the mesoscale. Here…
We use a continuum, two-fluid approach to study a mixture of two active nematic fluids. Even in the absence of thermodynamically-driven ordering, for mixtures of different activities we observe turbulent microphase separation, where domains…
We consider the hydrodynamic theory of an active fluid of self-propelled particles with nematic aligning interactions. This class of materials has polar symmetry at the microscopic level, but forms macrostates of nematic symmetry. We…
Successful realization of ferromagnetic nematic liquid crystals has opened up the possibility to experimentally study a completely new set of fundamental physical phenomena. In this contribution we present a detailed investigation of some…