Related papers: Cholesteric Phase in Virus Suspensions
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…
We study the phase diagram of director structures in cholesteric liquid crystals of negative dielectric anisotropy in homeotropic cells of thickness d which is smaller than the cholesteric pitch p. The basic control parameters are the…
The shear flow of a triblock copolymer micellar solution (PEO--PPO--PEO Pluronic P84 in brine) is investigated using simultaneous rheological and velocity profile measurements in the concentric cylinder geometry. We focus on two different…
Charged colloidal crystals exhibit a subtle interplay between electrostatic screening and elastic deformation. In an anisotropic elastic medium the coupling between dilation and the local ionic environment becomes direction dependent,…
Monodisperse suspensions of Brownian colloidal spheres crystallize at high densities, and ordering under shear has been observed at densities below the crystallization threshold. We perform large-scale simulations of a model suspension…
We investigate theoretically the wetting properties of cholesteric liquid crystals at a planar substrate. If the properties of substrate and of the interface are such that the cholesteric layers are not distorted the wetting properties are…
We examine the response of a dense colloidal suspension to a local force applied by a small magnetic bead. For small forces, we find a linear relationship between the force and the displacement, suggesting the medium is elastic, even though…
Strong effects of the Faraday instability on suspensions of rodlike colloidal particles are reported through measurements of the critical acceleration and of the surface wave amplitude. We show that the transition to parametrically excited…
We consider gelation of colloidal particles in suspension after cessation of shear flow. Particle aggregation is driven by a temperature-tunable attractive potential which controls the growth of clusters under isothermal conditions. A…
We used an optical reflection method to measure the temperature-dependence of the piezoelectricity, electrostriction and time constant of a morphotropic phase boundary (MPB) thin film. We obtained the piezoelectric constant and the…
We explore the dynamic response of vortex lines in a Pb thin film with a periodic array of antidots by means of ac-susceptibility measurements. For low drive field amplitudes, within the Campbell regime, vortex motion is of intra-valley…
For an understanding of DNA elasticity at high mechanical loads (F > 30 pN), its helical nature needs to be taken into account, in the form of coupling between the twist and stretch degrees of freedom. The prevailing model for DNA…
The coarsening instability typically disrupts steady-state cluster-size distributions. We show that degradation coupled to the cluster size, such as arising from biological proteolysis, leads to a novel fixed-point cluster size. Stochastic…
In this work we numerically study the switching dynamics of a 2D cholesteric emulsion droplet immersed in an isotropic fluid under an electric field, which is either uniform or rotating with constant speed. The overall dynamics depend…
We report on the construction of multiarm colloidal molecules by tip-linking filamentous bacteriophages, functionalized either by biological engineering or chemical conjugation. The affinity for streptavidin of a genetically modified vector…
Certain nematic liquid crystals, e.g., those formed by banana-shaped molecules, can exhibit a low-temperature twist-bend nematic (Ntb) phase. Upon addition of chiral dopants, a chiral version of the twist-bend phase (N*tb) can be observed…
We theoretically investigate general properties of driven (sheared) colloidal suspensions in confinement, based on methods of classical density functional theory. In the absence of an exact closed (Smoluchowski-) equation for the…
Elastic constants of two-dimensional (2D) colloidal crystals are determined by measuring strain fluctuations induced by Brownian motion of particles. Paramagnetic colloids confined to an air-water interface of a pending drop are…
Extensive Monte Carlo simulations and scaling arguments are used to study the colloidal charge reversal. The critical colloidal surface charge density $\sigma_c$ at which the reversal first appears is found to depend strongly on the ionic…
Electrical resistivity as a function of temperature, pressure, and magnetic field was measured in high and low purity single crystals of BaVS$_3$ close to the critical pressure value $p_{cr}$$\approx$2 GPa, associated with the zero…