Related papers: Cellular solid behaviour of liquid crystal colloid…
Liquid crystals have attracted enormous interest because of the variety of their phases and richness of their application. The interplay of general physical symmetries and specific molecular features generates a myriad of different…
The present work presents a density-functional microscopic model of soft biological tissue. The model was based on a prototype molecular structure from experimentally resolved collagen peptide residues and water clusters and has the…
The self-assembly of proteins into $\beta$-sheet-rich amyloid fibrils has been observed to occur with sigmoidal kinetics, indicating that the system initially is trapped in a metastable state. Here, we use a minimal lattice-based model to…
Foams made of complex fluids such as particle suspensions have a great potential for the development of advanced aerated materials. In this paper we study the rheological behavior of liquid foams loaded with granular suspensions. We focus…
Building on the striking similarity between the structure of the spindle during mitosis in living cells and nematic textures in confined liquid crystals, we use a continuum model of two-dimensional nematic liquid crystal droplets, to…
Chiral rodlike colloids exposed to strong depletion attraction may self-assemble into chiral membranes whose twisted director field differs from that of a 3D bulk chiral nematic. We formulate a simple microscopic variational theory to…
Self-assembly is one of the crucial mechanisms allowing to design multifunctional materials. Soft hybrid materials contain components of different nature and exhibit competitive interactions which drive self-organisation into structures of…
In an attempt to quantitatively characterize the recently observed slow dynamics in the isotropic and nematic phase of liquid crystals, we investigate the single-particle orientational dynamics of rodlike molecules across the…
Instabilities in thin elastic sheets, such as wrinkles, are of broad interest both from a fundamental viewpoint and also because of their potential for engineering applications. Nematic liquid crystal elastomers offer a new form of control…
We show by means of continuum theory and simulations that geometric percolation in uniaxial nematics of hard slender particles is fundamentally different from that in isotropic dispersions. In the nematic, percolation depends only very…
I put forward a continuum theory for active nematic gels, defined as fluids or suspensions of orientable rodlike objects endowed with active dynamics, that is based on symmetry arguments and compatibility with thermodynamics. The starting…
Liquid crystalline media mediate interactions between suspended particles and confining geometries, which not only has potential to guide patterning and bottom-up colloidal assembly, but can also control colloidal migration in microfluidic…
When a multicomponent liquid composed of particles with random interactions is slowly cooled below the freezing temperature, the fluid reorganises in order to increase (decrease) the number of strong (weak) attractive interactions and…
Most granular packings possess shear moduli ($G$) that increase with the applied external pressure, and bulk moduli ($B$) that increase or remain constant with pressure. This paper presents "tessellated" granular metamaterials for which…
Lipid membranes, the barrier defining living cells and many of their sub-compartments, bind to a wide variety of nano- and micro-meter sized objects. In the presence of strong adhesive forces, membranes can strongly deform and wrap the…
We review recent molecular dynamics simulations of thermally activated undulations and defects in the lamellar $L_\alpha$ phase of a binary amphiphile-solvent mixture, using an idealized molecular coarse-grained model: Solvent particles are…
We examine the behavior of spherical silica particles trapped at an air-nematic liquid crystal interface. When a strong normal anchoring is imposed, the beads spontaneously form various structures depending on their area density and the…
We use numerical simulations to investigate the hydrodynamic behavior of the interface between nematic (N) and isotropic (I) phases of a confined active liquid crystal. At low activities, a stable interface with constant shape and velocity…
We present a detailed numerical study of multi-component colloidal gels interacting sterically and obtained by arrested phase separation. Under deformation, we found that the interplay between the different intertwined networks is key.…
Nematicity is a well known property of liquid crystals and has been recently discussed in the context of strongly interacting electrons. An electronic nematic phase has been seen by many experiments in certain strongly correlated materials,…