Related papers: Complex Smectic Phases in Polymer Grafted Shape-Un…
Smectic liquid crystals are materials formed by stacking deformable, fluid layers. Though smectics prefer to have flat, uniformly-spaced layers, boundary conditions can impose curvature on the layers. Since the layer spacing and curvature…
Cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) can be considered as model colloidal rods and have practical applications in the formation of soft materials with tailored anisotropy. Here, we employ two contrasting microfluidic devices to quantitatively…
The charge ordered La$_{1/3}$Sr$_{2/3}$FeO$_{3-\delta}$ (LSFO) in bulk and nanocrystalline forms are investigated using ac and dc magnetization, M\"{o}ssbauer, and polarised neutron studies. A complex scenario of short range charge and…
We present a numerical study on geometric percolation in liquid dispersions of hard slender colloidal particles subjected to an external orienting field. In the formulation and liquid-state processing of nanocomposite materials, the…
The effects of dispersed aerosil nanoparticles on two of the phase transitions of the thermotropic liquid crystal material 4-n-pentylphenylthiol-4'-n-octyloxybenzoate 8barS5 have been studied using high-resolution x-ray diffraction…
This article analyzes modulated phases in liquid crystals, from the long-established cholesteric and blue phases to the recently discovered twist-bend, splay-bend, and splay nematic phases, as well as the twist-grain-boundary (TGB) and…
A spontaneous buckling transition in thin layers of monodomain nematic liquid crystalline gel was observed by polarized light microscopy. The coupling between the orientational ordering of liquid crystalline solvent and the translational…
A promising approach of designing mesostructured materials with novel physical behavior is to combine unique optical and electronic properties of solid nanoparticles with long-range ordering and facile response of soft matter to weak…
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…
Motivated by the structure of networks of cross-linked cytoskeletal biopolymers, we study the orientationally ordered phases in two-dimensional networks of randomly cross-linked semiflexible polymers. We consider permanent cross-links which…
We present a model for the combined nematic and `smectic' or stripe-like orders seen in recent scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) experiments in cuprates. We model the stripe order as an electronic charge density wave with associated…
We predict the existence of a new defect-lattice phase near the nematic - smectic-C (NC) transition. This tilt- analogue of the blue phase is a lattice of double-tilt cylinders. We discuss the structure and stability of the cone phase. We…
Recent observations of broken symmetries have partly demystified the pseudogap phase. Here we review evidence for long-range intra-unit-cell(IUC) nematic order and its unexpectedly strong coupling to the phase of the fluctuating stripes in…
Liquid crystals formed by acute-angle bent-core (ABC) molecules with a 1,7 naphthalene central core show an intriguing phase behavior with the nematic phase accompanied by poorly understood additional phases. In this work, we characterize…
Accelerated coarse-graining (CG) algorithms for simulating heterogeneous chemical reactions on surface systems have recently gained much attention. In the present paper, we consider such an issue by investigating the oscillation behavior of…
Confinement in the nanochannels of porous silicon strongly affects the phase behavior of the archetype liquid-crystal 4-n-octyl-4-cyanobiphenyl (8CB). A very striking phenom- enon is the development of a short-range smectic order, which…
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…
Inspired by recent simulations on highly open liquid crystalline structures formed by rigid planar nanorings we present a simple theoretical framework explaining the prevalence of smectic over nematic ordering in systems of ring-shaped…
Polymer-grafted nanoparticles are versatile building blocks that self-assemble into a rich diversity of mesostructures. Coarse-grained molecular simulations have commonly accompanied experiments by resolving structure formation pathways and…
The optical birefringence of rod-like nematogens (7CB, 8CB), imbibed in parallel silica channels with 10 nm diameter and 300 micrometer length, is measured and compared to the thermotropic bulk behavior. The orientational order of the…