Related papers: Active anisotropic diffusion of microparticles in …
Anisotropic diffusion governs transport in a wide range of soft and biological materials, where microstructure and molecular interactions jointly shape how matter moves. Here, we quantitatively investigate anisotropic molecular transport in…
Colloidal particles in a liquid crystal (LC) behave very differently from their counterparts in isotropic fluids. Elastic nature of the orientational order and surface anchoring of the director cause long-range anisotropic interactions and…
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…
As recently reported [Turiv T. et al., Science, 2013, Vol. 342, 1351], fluctuations in the orientation of the liquid crystal (LC) director can transfer momentum from the LC to a colloid, such that the diffusion of the colloid becomes…
The surface alignment of lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals (LCLCs) can be not only planar (tangential) but also homeotropic, with self-assembled aggregates perpendicular to the substrate, as demonstrated by mapping optical retardation and…
Motile liquid crystal (LC) colloids show peculiar behavior due to the high sensitivity to external stimuli driven by the LC elastic and surface effects. However, few studies focus on harnessing the LC phase transitions to propel colloidal…
Motile living organisms routinely probe their surroundings to adapt in ever-evolving environments. Although synthetic microswimmers offer surrogates for self-propelled living entities, they often lack the complex feedback mechanisms that…
It is well known that understanding the transport properties of liquid crystals (LCs) is crucial to optimise their performance in a number of technological applications. In this work, we analyse the effect of shape anisotropy on the…
The development of synthetic microswimmers has advanced our understanding of the fundamental self-propelled mechanisms of living systems. However, there are scarce studies at the microscale within highly structured anisotropic media, such…
The unbiased thermal diffusion of an overdamped Brownian particle in a square lattice potential is considered in the presence of an externally applied ac driving. The resulting diffusion matrix exhibits two orthogonal eigenvectors with…
Chromonic liquid crystals (CLCs) are lyotropic materials which are attracting growing interest for their adaptability to living systems. A considerable body of works has been devoted to exploring their properties and applications. In this…
Molecular anisotropy plays an important role in the glass transition of a liquid. Recently, a novel bulk glass state has been discovered by optical microscopy experiments on suspensions of ellipsoidal colloids. 'Liquid glass' is a…
A liquid crystal optical device made of an optically anisotropic heterostructure is considered. The device consists of a cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) layer sandwiched by two phase-shifting anisotropic layers of a nematic liquid crystal…
Active colloids in liquid crystals (ACLCs) is an active matter with qualitatively new facets of behavior as compared to active matter that becomes isotropic when relaxed into an equilibrium state. We discuss two classes of ACLCs: (i)…
Sessile droplets of a ferroelectric nematic liquid crystalline material were exposed to surface electric fields produced by pyroelectric and photogalvanic (photovoltaic) effects in X-cut iron-doped lithium niobate crystals. The resulting…
Nematic liquid crystal (LC) molecules adsorbed on two dimensional materials are aligned along the crystal directions of the hexagonal lattice. It was demonstrated that short electric pulses can reorient the aligned LC molecules in the…
Nonlinear optical propagation in cholesteric liquid crystals (CLC) with a spatially periodic helical molecular structure is studied experimentally and modeled numerically. This periodic structure can be seen as a Bragg grating with a…
Active (i.e., self-propelled or swimming) particles moving through an isotropic fluid exhibit conventional diffusive behavior. We report anomalous diffusion of an active particle moving in an anisotropic, nematic background. Whilst the…
Using dynamic light scattering, we measure for the first time the temperature-dependent elastic moduli and associated orientational viscosity coefficients of the nematic phase in a self-assembled lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal. The bend…
Active nematics are materials composed of mobile, elongated particles that can transform energy from the environment into a mechanical motion. Current experimental realizations of the active nematics are of biological origin and include…