Related papers: Singular Twist Waves in Chromonic Liquid Crystals
Molecular crystals often exist in multiple competing polymorphs, showing significantly different physico-chemical properties. Computational crystal structure prediction is key to interpret and guide the search for the most stable or useful…
We focus on solitary waves generated in arrays of lightly contacting spherical elastic granules by shock forces of steep rise and slow decay durations, and establish a priori: (i) whether the peak value of the resulting solitary wave would…
Pure liquids in thermodynamic equilibrium are structurally homogeneous. In liquid crystals, flow and light pulses are used to create reconfigurable domains with polar order. Moreover, through careful engineering of concerted microfluidic…
We consider shear wave propagation in soft viscoelastic solids of rate type. Based on objective stress rates, the constitutive model accounts for finite strain, incompressibility, as well as stress- and strain-rate viscoelasticity. The…
The goal of this work is to determine classes of traveling solitary wave solutions for Lattice Boltzmann schemes by means of an hyperbolic ansatz. It is shown that spurious solitary waves can occur in finite-difference solutions of…
We discuss recent developments and present new findings in the colloidal description of soft polymeric macromolecular aggregates. For various macromolecular architectures, such as linear chains, star polymers, dendrimers and polyelectrolyte…
We show by computer simulation of a two-dimensional crystal confined by corrugated walls that confinement can be used to impose a controllable mesoscopic superstructure of predominantly mechanical elastic character. Due to an interplay of…
Crystals form regular and robust structures that under extreme conditions can melt and recrystallize into different arrangements in a process that is called crystal metamorphism. While crystals exist due to the breaking of a continuous…
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…
We study the dynamics of small fluctuations about the uniform state of a crystal moving through a dissipative medium, e.g. a sedimenting colloidal crystal or a moving flux lattice, using a set of continuum equations for the displacement…
Knotted fields in classical and quantum systems have long been recognized for their non-trivial topologies and particle-like behavior, but practical applications have been limited by the difficulty of stabilizing them. Recently, stable…
In this work, we study the nematic-isotropic phase transition based on the dynamics of the Landau--De Gennes theory of liquid crystals. At the critical temperature, the Landau--De Gennes bulk potential favors the isotropic phase and nematic…
Nematic liquid crystals at rough and fluctuating interfaces are analyzed within the Frank elastic theory and the Landau-de Gennes theory. We study specifically interfaces that locally favor planar anchoring. In the first part we reconsider…
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…
We study the two-dimensional structural stability of shock waves in a compressible isentropic inviscid elastic fluid in the sense of the local-in-time existence and uniqueness of discontinuous shock front solutions of the equations of…
Coherent structures, such as solitary waves, appear in many physical problems, including fluid mechanics, optics, quantum physics, and plasma physics. A less studied setting is found in geophysics, where highly viscous fluids couple to…
Topological defects -- locations of local mismatch of order -- are a universal concept playing important roles in diverse systems studied in physics and beyond, including the universe, various condensed matter systems, and recently, even…
Experimental advances have allowed for the exploration of nearly isolated quantum many-body systems whose coupling to an external bath is very weak. A particularly interesting class of such systems is those which do not thermalize under…
We experimentally investigate the critical behavior of a phase transition between two topologically different turbulent states of electrohydrodynamic convection in nematic liquid crystals. The statistical properties of the observed…
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…