Related papers: Phase behaviour and defect structure of soft rods …
Lamellar or smectic phases often have an intricate intralamellar structure that remains scarcely understood from a microscopic viewpoint. In this work, we use molecular dynamics simulations to study the effect of volume exclusion and…
The dynamics of active smectic liquid crystals confined on a spherical surface is explored through an active phase field crystal model. Starting from an initially randomly perturbed isotropic phase, several types of topological defects are…
In equilibrium hard-rod fluids, and in effective hard-rod descriptions of anisotropic soft-particle systems, the transition from the isotropic (I) phase to the nematic phase (N) is observed above the rod aspect ratio L/D = 3.70 as predicted…
We report on a comprehensive computer simulation study of the liquid-crystal phase behaviour of purely repulsive, semi-flexible rod-like particles. For the four aspect ratios we consider, the particles form five distinct phases depending on…
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…
By employing Molecular Dynamics computer simulations, the phase behavior of systems of rodlike particles with varying degree of internal flexibility has been traced from the perfectly rigid rod limit till very flexible particles, and from…
We numerically investigate two-dimensional systems of hard rectangles at constant pressure through extensive hard-particle Monte Carlo simulations. We determine the complete phase diagram as a function of packing fraction and aspect ratio,…
We study the organization of topological defects in a system of nematogens confined to the two-dimensional sphere (S^2). We first perform Monte Carlo simulations of a fluid system of hard rods (spherocylinders) living in the tangent plane…
In this article we consider systems of parallel hard {\it superellipsoids}, which can be viewed as a possible interpolation between ellipsoids of revolution and cylinders. Superellipsoids are characterized by an aspect ratio and an exponent…
We have studied, using molecular dynamics simulations, the pressure-induced melting in a monolayer of soft repulsive spherocylinders whose centers of mass are constrained to move on the surface of a sphere. We show that the orientational…
We present the phase diagram of a system of mesogenic top-shaped molecules based on the Parsons- Lee density functional theory and Monte Carlo simulation. The molecules are modeled as a hard spherocylinder with a hard sphere embedded in its…
A nematic liquid crystal confined to the surface of a sphere exhibits topological defects of total charge $+2$ due to the topological constraint. In equilibrium, the nematic field forms four $+1/2$ defects, located at the corners of a…
Within the framework of Landau-de Gennes theory for nematic liquid crystals, we study the temperature-induced isotropic-nematic phase transition on a spherical shell. Below a critical temperature, a thin layer of nematic coating a…
We investigate the phase behaviour of a two-dimensional colloidal model system of ultra-soft particles on a substrate which varies periodically along one spatial direction. Our calculations are based on mean-field density functional theory…
The surface phase behavior of binary mixtures of colloidal hard rods in contact with a solid substrate (hard wall) is studied, with special emphasis on the region of the phase diagram that includes the smectic A phase. The colloidal rods…
Semiflexible polymers in concentrated lyotropic solution are studied within a bead-spring model by molecular dynamics simulations, focusing on the emergence of a smectic A phase and its properties. We systematically vary the density of the…
Recently, a new class of smectic liquid crystal phases (SmCP phases) characterized by the spontaneous formation of macroscopic chiral domains from achiral bent-core molecules has been discovered. We have carried out Monte Carlo simulations…
A coupled phase-field and hydrodynamic model is introduced to describe a two-phase, weakly compressible smectic (layered phase) in contact with an isotropic fluid of different density. A non-conserved smectic order parameter is coupled to a…
Using computer simulations we investigate the microscopic structure of the singular director field within a nematic droplet. As a theoretical model for nematic liquid crystals we take hard spherocylinders. To induce an overall topological…
We study the phase behaviour of cholesteric liquid crystal shells with different geometries. We compare the cases of tangential and no anchoring at the surface, focussing on the former case, which leads to a competition between the…