Related papers: Cellular solid behaviour of liquid crystal colloid…
We compute effective energies of thin bilayer structures composed by soft nematic elastic-liquid crystals in various geometrical regimes and functional configurations. Our focus is on order-strain interaction in elastic foundations composed…
Homeotropic Nematic Liquid Crystal heated from above present convective Rayleigh-Benard instability for applied thermal gradients greater than $\Delta$Tc. This threshold increase with the intensity of applied external magnetic field…
Understanding the coupled thermo-mechanical behaviour of compacted granular beds can benefit various industrial applications, such as pebble bed design in fusion reactors. In this study, a thermo-mechanical discrete element method based on…
Modeling membrane interactions with arbitrarily shaped colloidal particles, such as environmental micro- and nanoplastics, at the cell scale remains particularly challenging, owing to the complexity of particle geometries and the need to…
Monopole-like electrostatic interactions are ubiquitous in biology and condensed matter, but they are often screened by counter-ions and cannot be switched from attractive to repulsive. In colloidal science, where the prime goal is to…
Microbullet particles, cylinders with one blunt and one spherical end, offer a novel platform to study the effects of anisotropy and curvature on colloidal assembly in complex fluids. Here, we disperse microbullets in…
The common description of the electrical behavior of a nematic liquid crystal as an anisotropic dielectric medium with (weak) ohmic conductivity is extended to an electrodiffusion model with two active ionic species. Under appropriate, but…
The ability to dictate colloid motion is an important challenge in fields ranging from materials science to living systems. Here, by embedding energy landscapes in confined nematic liquid crystals, we design a versatile platform to define…
Dispersions of rodlike colloidal particles exhibit a plethora of liquid crystalline states, including nematic, smectic A, smectic B, and columnar phases. This phase behavior can be explained by presuming the predominance of hard-core volume…
Jammed packings of granular materials display complex mechanical response. For example, the ensemble-averaged shear modulus $\left\langle G \right\rangle$ increases as a power-law in pressure $p$ for static packings of soft spherical…
We study the phase ordering dynamics of a two dimensional model colloidal solid using molecular dynamics simulations. The colloid particles interact with each other with a Hamaker potential modified by the presence of equatorial "patches"…
Many living and artificial systems show a similar emergent behavior and collective motions on different scales, starting from swarms of bacteria to synthetic active particles, herds of mammals and crowds of people. What all these systems…
The ability to manipulate polar entities with multiple external fields opens exciting possibilities for emerging functionalities and novel applications in spin systems, photonics, metamaterials, and soft matter. Liquid crystals (LCs),…
A spontaneous buckling transition in thin layers of monodomain nematic liquid crystalline gel was observed by polarized light microscopy. The coupling between the orientational ordering of liquid crystalline solvent and the translational…
Nematic liquid crystals confined to geometrically as well as chemically patterned substrate on one end and a flat substrate with strong anchoring on the other is studied using non-Boltzmann Monte Carlo methods. We observe significant…
We present confocal microscopy studies of novel particle-stabilized emulsions. The novelty arises because the immiscible fluids have an accessible upper critical solution temperature. The emulsions have been created by beginning with…
Solid-state nanofoaming experiments are conducted on two PMMA grades of markedly different molecular weight using CO$_2$ as the blowing agent. The sensitivity of porosity to foaming time and foaming temperature is measured. Also, the…
The hydrodynamic theory of active nematics has been often used to describe the spatio-temporal dynamics of cell flows and motile topological defects within soft confluent tissues. Those theories, however, often rely on the assumption that…
Engineering synthetic materials that mimic the remarkable complexity of living organisms is a fundamental challenge in science and technology. We study the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematicfilm of microtubules and…
The flow of a liquid crystal around a particle does not only depend on its shape and the viscosity coefficients but also on the direction of the molecules. We studied the resulting drag force on a sphere moving in a nematic liquid crystal…