Related papers: Orientational ordering in active nematic solids
The stability of liquid crystal phases in presence of small amount of non-mesogenic impurities is of general interest for a large spectrum of technological applications and in the theories of binary mixtures. Starting from the known phase…
We consider a two-dimensional lattice model for liquid crystals consisting of long rods interacting via purely hard core interactions, with two allowed orientations defined by the underlying lattice. We rigorously prove the existence of a…
We study the viscoelasticity of an active solution of polar biofilaments and motor proteins. Using a molecular model, we derive the constitutive equations for the stress tensor in the isotropic phase and in phases with liquid crystalline…
Using agent-based simulations of self-propelled particles subject to short-range repulsion and nematic alignment we explore the dynamical phases of a dense active material confined to the surface of a sphere. We map the dynamical phase…
The translation and shape deformations of a passive viscous Newtonian droplet immersed in an active nematic liquid crystal under circular confinement are analyzed using a linear stability analysis. We focus on the case of a sharply aligned…
Engineering synthetic materials that mimic the remarkable complexity of living organisms is a fundamental challenge in science and technology. We study the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematicfilm of microtubules and…
The alignment of fibers and cells in living tissues affect their mechanical properties and functionality. In this context, one can draw an analogy between tissues and nematic liquid crystal elastomers. We explore this analogy by growing…
Most, but not all, liquid crystals tend to align when subject to shear flow, while most nematic polymeric liquid crystals undergo a tumbling instability, where the director rotate with the flow. The reasons of this instability remain…
We theoretically investigate the threshold for the director reorientation from the homeotropic state to the hybrid homeotropic-planar state and vice versa in a cell filled with a flexoelectric nematic liquid crystal (NLC) subjected to an…
We investigate the emergence of orientational order among +1/2 disclinations in active nematic liquid crystals. Using a combination of theoretical and experimental methods, we show that +1/2 disclinations have short-range antiferromagnetic…
Bacterial colonies composed of elongated cells form active nematic fluids that spontaneously self-organise into ordered domains of aligned cells and exhibit self-generated chaotic flows powered by cell growth. While their dynamics have…
Organogenesis involves large deformations and complex shape changes that require elaborate mechanical regulation. Models of tissue biomechanics have been introduced to account for the coupling between mechanical response and biochemical…
Active systems, from bacterial suspensions to cellular monolayers, are continuously driven out of equilibrium by local injection of energy from their constituent elements and exhibit turbulent-like and chaotic patterns. Here we demonstrate…
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…
We propose a general strategy for reduced order modeling of systems that display highly nonlinear oscillations. By considering a continuous family of forced periodic orbits defined in relation to a stable fixed point and subsequently…
When liquid-crystal elastomers are prepared without any alignment, disordered polydomain structures emerge as the materials are cooled into the nematic phase. These polydomain structures have been attributed to quenched disorder in the…
We theoretically study the nematic ordering transition of rods that are able to elastically adjust their mutually excluded volumes. The model rods, which consist of a hard core surrounded by a deformable shell, mimic the structure of…
Colloidal particles in liquid crystals tend to induce topological defects and distortions of the molecular alignment within the surrounding anisotropic host medium, which results in elasticity-mediated interactions not accessible to their…
A generalized model taking into account the photoisomerization influence on the nematic ordering is presented. This generalized theory is used to investigate the effect of the nonextensivity on the concentration dependence of the long-range…
We study smectic-liquid-crystal order in a cell with a heterogeneous substrate imposing surface random positional and orientational pinnings. Proposing a minimal random elastic model, we demonstrate that, for a thick cell, the smectic state…