Related papers: Phase Ordering in Nematic Liquid Crystals
Pattern formation in uniaxial polymeric liquid crystals is studied for different dynamic closure approximations. Using the principles of mesoscopic non-equilibrium thermodynamics in a mean-field approach, we derive a Fokker-Planck equation…
A phase transition for bosonic atoms in a two-dimensional anisotropic optical lattice is considered. If the tunnelling rates in two directions are different, the system can undergo a transition between a two-dimensional superfluid and a…
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…
We investigate how coupling to fluid flow influences defect-mediated transitions in two-dimensional passive nematic fluids using fluctuating nematohydrodynamic simulations. The system is driven by tuning the fluctuation strength, with…
We develop a Q-tensor model of nematic liquid crystals occupying a stationary surface which represents a fluidic material film in space. In addition to the evolution due to Landau--de\,Gennes energy the model includes a tangent viscous…
Liquid crystals are assemblies of rod-like molecules which self-organize to form mesophases, in-between ordinary liquids and anisotropic crystals. At each point, the molecules collectively orient themselves along a privileged direction,…
Using a version of density-functional theory which combines Onsager approximation and fundamental-measure theory for spatially nonuniform phases, we have studied the phase diagram of freely rotating hard rectangles and hard discorectangles.…
Continuum models of active nematic gels have proved successful to describe a number of biological systems consisting of a population of rodlike motile subunits in a fluid environment. However, in order to get a thorough understanding of the…
Liquid crystal materials exhibiting up to three nematic phases are reported. Dielectric response measurements show that while the lower temperature nematic phase has ferroelectric order and the highest temperature nematic phase is apolar,…
We apply lattice Boltzmann methods to study the segregation of binary fluid mixtures under oscillatory shear flow in two dimensions. The algorithm allows to simulate systems whose dynamics is described by the Navier-Stokes and the…
We study a nanosecond electro-optic response of a nematic liquid crystal in a geometry where an applied electric field $\textbf{E}$ modifies the tensor order parameter but does not change the orientation of the optic axis (director…
We consider various sufficiently nonlinear sigma models for nematic liquid crystal ordering of RP^{N-1} type and of lattice gauge type with continous symmetries. We rigorously show that they exhibit a first-order transition in the…
Both uniaxial and biaxial nematic liquid crystals are defined by orientational ordering of their building blocks. While uniaxial nematics only orient the long molecular axis, biaxial order implies local order along three axes. As the…
The study of hydrodynamics of liquid crystal leads to many fasci- nating mathematical problems, which has prompted various interesting works recently. This article reviews the static Oseen-Frank theory and surveys some recent progress on…
Liquid crystals consisting of biaxial particles can exhibit a much richer phase behavior than their uniaxial counterparts. Usually, one has to rely on simulation results to understand the phase diagram of these systems, since very few…
We report the observation of the transition from an ordered solid-like phase to a disordered liquid-like phase of a lattice of spikes on a ferrofluid surface submitted to horizontal sinusoidal vibrations. The melting transition occurs for a…
Molecular anisotropy plays an important role in the glass transition of a liquid. Recently, a novel bulk glass state has been discovered by optical microscopy experiments on suspensions of ellipsoidal colloids. 'Liquid glass' is a…
Using the density functional formalism we derive expression for the distortion free energy for systems with continuous broken symmetry and use it to derive expression for the elastic constants of smectic phases in which director is tilted…
We study experimentally the impact of spherical nanoparticles on the orientational order parameters of a host nematic liquid crystal. We use spherical core-shell quantum dots that are surface functionalized to promote homeotropic anchoring…
We present a mesoscopic lattice model for non-ideal fluid flows with directional interactions, mimicking the effects of hydrogen-bonds in water. The model supports a rich and complex structural dynamics of the orientational order parameter,…