Related papers: Singular Twist Waves in Chromonic Liquid Crystals
We investigate experimentally and numerically the defect configurations emerging when a cholesteric liquid crystal is confined to a spherical shell. We uncover a rich scenario of defect configurations, some of them non-existent in nematic…
Handedness of the director twist in cholesteric liquid crystals is commonly assumed to be the same throughout the medium, determined solely by the chirality of constituent molecules or chiral additives, albeit distortions of the…
The motion of three-dimensional (3D) solitary waves and solitons in nonlinear crystal-like structures, such as photonic materials, is studied. It is demonstrated that collective excitations in these systems can be tailored to move in…
The hydrodynamic stresses created by active particles can destabilise orientational order present in the system. This is manifested, for example, by the appearance of a bend instability in active nematics or in quasi-2-dimensional living…
Curved particles have been shown to stabilize a range of states with unique order in dense suspensions of colloidal bent core liquid crystals. The shape of the colloidal rods encourages the formation of curved director fields. However,…
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…
Spiral waves are investigated in chemical systems whose underlying spatially-homogeneous dynamics is governed by a deterministic chaotic attractor. We show how the local periodic behavior in the vicinity of a spiral defect is transformed to…
An elastic quartic twist theory has recently been proposed for chromonic liquid crystals, intended to overcome the paradoxical conclusions encountered by the classical Oseen-Frank theory when applied to droplets submerged in an isotropic…
The effect of rough walls on the phase behaviour of a confined liquid crystal (LC) fluid is studied using constant pressure Monte Carlo simulations. The LC is modelled as a fluid of soft ellipsoidal molecules and the rough walls are…
Solitons in nematic liquid crystals offer intriguing opportunities for transport and sensing in microfluidic systems. Little is known about the elementary conditions that are needed to create solitons in nematic materials. In this work,…
Rayleigh waves are considered for crystals possessing at least one plane of symmetry. The secular equation is established explicitly for surface waves propagating in any direction of the plane of symmetry, using two different methods. This…
The ground state of twist-bend nematic liquid crystals is a heliconical molecular arrangement in which the nematic director precesses uniformly about an axis, making a fixed angle with it. Both precession senses are allowed in the ground…
Liquids in systems with spherically symmetric interactions are not thermodynamically stable when the range of the attraction is reduced sufficiently. However, these metastable liquids have lifetimes long enough that they are readily…
Nematic liquid crystal (LC) is a partially ordered matter that has been a popular model system for studying a variety of topological behaviors in condensed matter. In this work, utilizing a spontaneously twisting achiral LC, we introduce a…
The twist-bend nematic liquid crystal phase is a three-dimensional fluid in which achiral bent molecules spontaneously form an orientationally ordered macroscopically chiral heliconical winding of molecular scale pitch, in absence of…
We consider a one-dimensional variational problem arising in connection with a model for cholesteric liquid crystals. The principal feature of our study is the assumption that the twist deformation of the nematic director incurs much higher…
We report curling self-propulsion in aqueous emulsions of common mesogenic compounds. Nematic liquid crystal droplets self-propel in a surfactant solution with concentrations above the critical micelle concentration while undergoing…
In liquid-crystalline elastomers, the nematic order parameter and the induced strain vary smoothly across the isotropic-nematic transition, without the expected first-order discontinuity. To investigate this smooth variation, we measure the…
Real magnonic crystals - periodic magnetic media for spin wave (magnon) propagation - may contain some defects. We report theoretical spin wave spectra of a one dimensional magnonic crystal with an isolated defect. The latter is modeled by…
Liquid crystals in two dimensions undergo a first-order isotropic-to-quasi-nematic transition, provided the particle interactions are sufficiently ``sharp and narrow''. This implies phase coexistence between isotropic and quasi-nematic…