Related papers: Polarity from the Bottom Up: A Computational Frame…
Electric dipoles of water molecules, enclosed singly in regularly spaced nanopores of a cordierite crystal, become ordered at low temperature due to their mutual interaction and show the frequency dependence of their dielectric…
Dipoles in triangular optical ladders constitute a flexible platform for the study of the interplay between geometric frustration and long-range anisotropic interactions, and in particular for the observation of the spontaneous onset of…
Ferroelectric nematic (NF) liquid crystals combine liquid-like fluidity and orientational order of conventional nematics with macroscopic electric polarization comparable in magnitude to solid state ferroelectric materials. Here, we present…
Many biological systems, such as bacterial suspensions and actomyosin networks, form polar liquid crystals. These systems are `active' or far-from-equilibrium, due to local forcing of the solvent by the constituent particles. In many cases…
The hydrodynamic theory of polar liquid crystals is widely used to describe biological active fluids as well as passive molecular materials. Depending on the `shear-alignment parameter', in passive or weakly active polar fluids under…
Fluid molecular ferroelectrics are a new class of organic materials where ferroelectricity is found in conjunction with 3D fluidity whilst still retaining spontaneous polarization values comparable to their traditional solid state…
Ferroelectric order in polar liquids has been observed in numerical simulations and liquid-crystal experiments. In mean-field frameworks, this behavior is associated to sample-shape dependent, surface contribution to the free energy. This…
Domain boundaries and other twin boundaries in crystalline materials are receiving increasing interest. They can carry unique functional properties, which in many cases are absent in the surrounding bulk material. One such property of…
The strongly interacting system created in ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions behaves almost as an ideal fluid with rich patterns of the velocity field exhibiting strong vortical structure. Vorticity of the fluid, via spin-orbit coupling,…
It is well-known that the liquid properties in a strongly confined system can be very different from their ordinary behaviors in an extended system, due to the competition between the thermal energy and the interaction energy. Here we show…
Liquid crystal materials exhibiting up to three nematic phases are reported. Dielectric response measurements show that while the lower temperature nematic phase has ferroelectric order and the highest temperature nematic phase is apolar,…
We explore the phase behavior and structure of orthogonal smectic liquid crystals consisting of bent-core molecules (BCMs) by means of Monte Carlo molecular simulations. A simple athermal molecular model is introduced that describes the…
Active matter exhibits remarkable collective behavior in which flows, continuously generated by active particles, are intertwined with the orientational order of these particles. The relationship remains poorly understood as the activity…
Recently, we proposed a self-propelled particle model with competing alignment interactions: nearby particles tend to align their velocities whereas they anti-align their direction of motion with particles which are further away [R.…
We study the spatially homogeneous phases of polar active particles in the low density limit, and specifically the transition from the isotropic phase to collective polar motion. We show that the fundamental quantity of interest for the…
Phase separation in a complex fluid with lamellar order has been studied in the case of cold thermal fronts propagating diffusively from external walls. The velocity hydrodynamic modes are taken into account by coupling the…
Ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals are formed by achiral molecules with large dipole moments. Its three-dimensional orientational order is universally described as unidirectionally polar. We demonstrate that the ground state of…
We propose an experimental scheme to effectively assemble chains of dipolar gases with an uniform length in a multi-layer system. The obtained dipolar chains can form a chain crystal with the system temperature easily controlled by the…
Polar active particles constitute a wide class of synthetic colloids that are able to propel along a preferential direction, given by their polar axis. Here, we demonstrate a generic self-phoretic mechanism that leads to their spontaneous…
Motivated by recent experimental findings, we investigate the possible occurrence and characteristics of quasicrystalline order in two-dimensional mixtures of point dipoles with two sorts of dipole moments. Despite the fact that the dipolar…