Related papers: Flexoelectricity versus Electrostatics in Polar Ne…
The microscopic and fundamental origin of slide electrification, where droplets of water move across insulating surfaces accumulating and depositing electrical charges, is still debated. Charge transfer is often attributed to ion transfer…
Flexoelectricity has garnered much attention owing to its ability to bring electromechanical functionality to non-piezoelectric materials and its nanoscale significance. In order to move towards a more complete understanding of this…
Topological defects play a pivotal role in the physics of liquid crystals and represent one of the most prominent and well studied aspects of mesophases. While in two-dimensional nematics, disclinations are traditionally treated as…
While twist-bend nematic phases have been extensively studied, the experimental observation of two dimensional, oscillating splay-bend phases is recent. We consider two theoretical models that have been used to explain the formation of…
The basic continuum model for polar fluids is deceptively simple. The free energy integral consists of four terms: The coupling of polarization to an external field, the electrostatic energy of the induced electric field interacting with…
Monte Carlo simulations are used to examine cooperative creation of polar state in fluids of two-state particles with nonzero dipole in the excited state. With lowering temperature such systems undergo a second order transition from…
Ferroelectric materials are characterized by the presence of an electric dipole that can be reversed by application of an external electric field, a feature that is exploited in ferroelectric memories. All ferroelectrics are piezoelectric,…
We study colloidal particles in a nematic-liquid-crystal-filled microfluidic channel and show how elastic interactions between the particle and the channel wall lead to different particle dynamics compared with conventional microfluidics.…
Liquid crystals consisting of biaxial particles can exhibit a much richer phase behavior than their uniaxial counterparts. Usually, one has to rely on simulation results to understand the phase diagram of these systems, since very few…
We study a system of nonlinear partial differential equations modeling the electrokinetics of a nematic electrolyte material consisting of various ion species suspended in a nematic liquid crystal within a bounded domain in two or three…
The pioneering realization of suspensions of ferroelectric nanoparticles in a nematic host was one of excellent contributions of Yuri Reznikov to the science of liquid crystals [Y. Reznikov et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 82 (2003) 191]. This…
We consider the effects of polydispersity on isotropic-nematic phase equilibria in thermotropic liquid crystals, using a Maier-Saupe theory with factorized interactions. A sufficient spread (approx. 50%) in the interaction strengths of the…
It was shown that free energy density of the local flexomagnetoelectric effect is determined by the four phenomenological constants in case of the cubic (hexoctahedral) crystal. The well-known single-constant Lifshitz invariant term is…
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…
Nematic liquid crystals in a polyhedral domain, a prototype for bistable displays, may be described by a unit-vector field subject to tangent boundary conditions. Here we consider the case of a rectangular prism. For configurations with…
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…
We study the pair interaction of charged silica microrods in chiral nematic liquid crystals and show that the microrods with homeotropic surface anchoring form a bound state due to the competing effect of electrostatic (Coulomb) and elastic…
Different liquid crystalline phases with long-range orientational but not positional order, so-called nematic phases, are scarce. It rarely occurs that a new nematic phase is discovered and such event is inevitably accompanied by a great…
We study the phase behavior of a nematic liquid crystal confined between a flat substrate with strong anchoring and a patterned substrate whose structure and local anchoring strength we vary. By first evaluating an effective surface free…
Nematic liquid crystals exhibit both crystal-like and fluid-like features. In particular, the propagation of an acoustic wave shows an unexpected occurrence of some of the solid-like features at the hydrodynamic level, namely, the…