Related papers: Soft and non-soft structural transitions in disord…
Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are soft phase-changing solids that exhibit large reversible contractions upon heating, Goldstone-like soft modes and resultant microstructural instabilities. We heat a planar LCE slab to isotropic, clamp…
Spatial heterogeneity in the elastic properties of soft random solids is investigated via a two-pronged approach. First, a nonlocal phenomenological model for the elastic free energy is examined. This features a quenched random kernel,…
Active semiflexible filament collectives, ranging from motor-driven cytoskeletal filaments to slender organisms such as cyanobacteria and worm aggregates, abound in nature. Yet how activity and flexibility jointly govern their organization,…
A d-wave high temperature cuprate superconductor exhibits a nematic ordering transition at zero temperature. Near the quantum critical point, the coupling between gapless nodal quasiparticles and nematic order parameter fluctuation can…
We study the monodomain (single-crystal) nematic elastomer materials, all side-chain siloxane polymers with the same mesogenic groups and crosslinking density, but differing in the type of crosslinking. Increasing the proportion of long…
A comprehensive theory for electronic transport in itinerant ferromagnets is developed. We first show that the Q-field theory used previously to describe a disordered Fermi liquid also has a saddle-point solution that describes a…
We explore the interplay between nematicity~(spontaneous breaking of the sixfold rotational symmetry), superconductivity, and non-Fermi liquid behavior in partially flat-band models on the triangular lattice. A key result is that the…
We discuss the quantum phase transition between a quantum nematic metallic state to an electron metallic smectic state in terms of an order-parameter theory coupled to fermionic quasiparticles. Both commensurate and incommensurate smectic…
The paper develops a continuum theory of weak viscoelastic nematodynamics of Maxwell type. It may describe the molecular elasticity effects in mono-domain flows of liquid crystalline polymers as well as the viscoelastic effects in…
We report a dynamical-mechanical study of stress relaxation at small deformation in a natural (polyisoprene) rubber well above its glass transition temperature Tg. We find that an almost complete relaxation of stress takes place over very…
Disordered filamentous networks with compliant crosslinks exhibit a low linear elastic shear modulus at small strains, but stiffen dramatically at high strains. Experiments have shown that the elastic modulus can increase by up to three…
Spin-driven nematic order that has been proposed for iron-based superconductors is generated by pronounced fluctuations of a striped density wave state. On the other hand it is a well known fact that nematic order parameter couples…
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…
We report filling-fraction dependent dielectric spectroscopy measurements on the relaxation dynamics of the rod-like nematogen 7CB condensed in 13 nm silica nanochannels. In the film-condensed regime, a slow interface relaxation dominates…
Uniaxial elastomers are characterized by five elastic constants. If their elastic modulus C_5 describing the energy of shear strains in planes containing the anisotropy axis vanishes, they are said to be soft. In spatial dimensions d less…
The toughness of a polymer material can increase significantly if two networks are combined into one material. This toughening effect is a consequence of a transition from a brittle to a ductile failure response. Although this transition…
We present a theory for the elasticity of cross-linked stiff polymer networks. Stiff polymers, unlike their flexible counterparts, are highly anisotropic elastic objects. Similar to mechanical beams stiff polymers easily deform in bending,…
We study the flat phase of nematic elastomer membranes with rotational symmetry spontaneously broken by in-plane nematic order. Such state is characterized by a vanishing elastic modulus for simple shear and soft transverse phonons. At…
Liquid-crystal networks consist of weakly crosslinked polymers that are coupled to liquid-crystal molecules. The resultant hybrid system has rich elastic properties. We develop a phase field model to describe mechanical properties of a…
The dielectric spectra of the twist bend nematic phase of the bent shaped achiral liquid crystal dimer are studied for the determination of the different relaxation modes. The two molecular processes were assigned one to the precessional…