Related papers: Singular Twist Waves in Chromonic Liquid Crystals
We propose and study a local map capable of describing the full variety of dynamical states, ranging from regular to chaotic, obtained when a nematic liquid crystal is subjected to a steady shear flow. The map is formulated in terms of a…
This paper reviews the complex ordered structures induced by chirality in liquid crystals. In general, chirality favors a twist in the orientation of liquid-crystal molecules. In some cases, as in the cholesteric phase, this favored twist…
Nematic and columnar phases of lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals (LCLCs) have been long studied for their fundamental and applied prospects in material science and medical diagnostics. LCLC phases represent different self-assembled states…
Nuclei of ordered materials emerging from the isotropic state usually show a shape topologically equivalent to a sphere; the well-known examples are crystals and nematic liquid crystal droplets. In this work, we explore experimentally and…
Electro-hydrodynamic phenomena in liquid crystals constitute an old but still very active research area. The reason is that these phenomena play the key role in various applications of liquid crystals and due to the general interest of…
The focusing of acoustic waves is used to study nucleation phenomena in liquids. At large amplitude, non-linear effects are important so that the magnitude of pressure or density oscillations is difficult to predict. We present a…
We describe electrophoresis of spherical dielectric particles in a uniformly aligned nematic medium with a negative dielectric anisotropy. A spherical particle that orients the liquid crystal (LC) perpendicularly to its surface moves under…
We present a novel, self-consistent and robust theoretical model to investigate elastic interactions between topological defects in liquid crystal shells. Accounting for the non-concentric nature of the shell in a simple manner, we are able…
New quantum phenomena are continuously being discovered in 2D systems. In particular, the charge density wave (CDW) has the aspect of a quantum crystal with a macroscopic wave function (order parameter), so unlike quantum liquids…
In this Letter, we predict a structural phase transition unique to chiral crystals with screw symmetry. In chiral crystals, the phonon frequency renormalized by the electron-phonon coupling depends on the handedness of circular…
An influential result of F. John states that no genuinely non-linear strictly hyperbolic quasi-linear first order system of partial differential equations in two variables has a global $C^2$-solution for small enough initial data. Inspired…
Twisted hedgehogs are defects in spherical cavities with homeotropic anchoring for the nematic director that arise when twist distortions are sufficiently less energetic than splay (and bend) distortions. They bear a characteristic…
Following the discovery of moir\'e-driven superconductivity in twisted graphene multilayers, twistronics has spurred a surge of interest in tailored broken symmetries through angular rotations, enabling new properties from electronics to…
We study the evolution of charged droplets of a conducting viscous liquid. The flow is driven by electrostatic repulsion and capillarity. These droplets are known to be linearly unstable when the electric charge is above the Rayleigh…
A nematic liquid-crystal gel is a macroscopically homogeneous elastic medium with the rotational symmetry of a nematic liquid crystal. In this paper, we develop a general approach to the study of these gels that incorporates all underlying…
We study the switching dynamics in two-domain and four-domain twisted nematic liquid crystal devices. The equilibrium configuration of these devices involves the coexistence of regions characterised by different handedness of the inherent…
For suitable initial and boundary data, we construct infinitely many weak solutions to the nematic liquid crystal flows in dimension three. These solutions are in the axisymmetric class with bounded energy and backward bubbling at a large…
Crystals spontaneously break the continuous translation symmetry in space, despite the invariance of the underlying energy function. This has triggered suggestions of time crystals analogously lifting translational invariance in time.…
The weakly nonlinear dynamics of the free surface of a dielectric liquid in an electric field directed tangentially to the unperturbed boundary is investigated numerically. Within the framework of the strong field model, when the effects of…
Chiral nematic liquid crystals are one-dimensional photonic band-gap materials whose reflection wavelength can be well tuned by temperature, but only limited and irreversible tuning can be achieved by electric fields. In contrast, oblique…