Related papers: Elastic constants from direct correlation function…
We propose an approach to measure surface elastic constants of soft solids. Generally, this requires one to probe interfacial mechanics at around the elastocapillary length scale, which is typically microscopic. Deformations of microscopic…
We investigate theoretically the elliptical shapes of soft colloids in freely standing smectic C films, that have been reported recently. The colloids favour parallel alignment of the liquid crystal molecules at their surfaces and, for…
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…
We consider the evolution and interaction of a 2-dimensional nematic liquid crystal of Ericksen-Leslie type within a 1-dimensional flexible viscoelastic structure. This is a fully macroscopic model in which the nematic liquid crystal is…
The elastocaloric effect (ECE) is a thermodynamic quantity relating changes in entropy to changes in strain experienced by a material. As such, ECE measurements can provide valuable information about the entropy landscape proximate to…
We develop a formal analogy between configurational stresses in two distinct physical systems, and study the flows that they induce when the configurations of interest include topological de- fects. The two systems in question are…
A theoretical analysis is presented of a nematic liquid crystal confined between substrates pat- terned with squares that promote vertical and planar alignment. Two approaches are used to eluci- date the behavior across a wide range of…
This paper outlines an energy-minimization finite-element approach to the computational modeling of equilibrium configurations for nematic liquid crystals under free elastic effects. The method targets minimization of the system free energy…
As is well known, hard-sphere crystals of the fcc and hcp type differ very little in their thermodynamic properties. Nonetheless, recent computer simulations by Pronk and Frenkel indicate that the elastic response to mechanical deformation…
This letter presents a closed-form integral-equation formulation that models the director tilting in nematic liquid crystals. The proposed formulation is computationally efficient compared to numerical methods and provides a physical…
We show that the prediction of mode-coupling theory for a model of a network-forming strong glass-former correctly describes the wave-vector dependence of the Debye-Waller factor. To obtain a good description it is important to take into…
Condensates of active particles such as cells form almost-crystalline lattices which play a central role in many biological systems. Typically, their properties have been determined merely by analogy to the rather trivial one-dimensional…
We investigate the asymptotic behaviour of a correlation function associated with a nematic liquid crystal system undergoing an isotropic-nematic phase transition following an instantaneous change of temperature. Within the setting of…
In this paper, a Freedericksz-like positional transition is found for a spherical micro-droplet suspended in a nematic liquid crystal cell in the presence of an external electric field. Based on the numerical calculation of elastic energy…
Present work is a theoretical study on the stability of the thermotropic biaxial nematic liquid crystal phase in model systems. Its main aim is to present the phase diagrams of spatially uniform liquid mesophases and to identify the…
In a recent letter, Christian Beck described a theoretical link between a family of stochastic differential equations and the probability density functions (PDF) derived from the formalism of nonextensive statistical mechanics. He applied…
We compute the effective dispersion and vibrational density of states (DOS) of two-dimensional sub-regions of three dimensional face centered cubic (FCC) crystals using both a direct projection-inversion technique and a Monte Carlo…
Recent experiments have reported that ferroelectric nanoparticles have drastic effects on nematic liquid crystals--increasing the isotropic-nematic transition temperature by about 5 K, and greatly increasing the sensitivity to applied…
Expressions are obtained for force and couple densities and stress tensors in macroscopic models for nematic liquid crystals subjected to electric fields. The coupling between the liquid crystal orientational properties and the electric…
In complex crystals close to melting or at finite temperatures, different types of defects are ubiquitous and their role becomes relevant in the mechanical response of these solids. Conventional elasticity theory fails to provide a…