Related papers: Phase Transitions in Lyotropic Nematic Gels
Only a few years have passed since discovery of polar nematics, and now they are becoming the most actively studied liquid crystal materials. Despite numerous breakthrough findings made recently, a theoretical systematization is still…
Linear polymers and other connected "line liquids" exhibit a coupling between density and equilibrium nematic order on the macroscopic level that gives rise to a Meyer-de Gennes vectorial conservation law. Nevertheless, isotropic linear…
Recently, Tavarone et al. (J. Chem. Phys. 143, 114505 (2015)) discussed phase behavior of zig-zag and bow-shaped particles composed of three needles. The authors presented very interesting results of extensive Monte Carlo simulations with…
The stability of demixing phase transition in binary mixtures of hard plates (with thickness L and diameter D) and hard spheres (with diameter $\sigma$) is studied by means of Parsons-Lee theory. The isotropic-isotropic demixing, which is…
Polymers are a primary building block in many biomaterials, often interacting with anisotropic backgrounds. While previous studies have considered polymer dynamics within nematic solvents, rarely are the the effects of anisotropic viscosity…
We present a model of classical hard-core dimers on the square lattice that contains an Ising nematic phase in its phase diagram. We consider a model with an attractive interaction for parallel dimers on a given plaquette of the square…
Recent experimental and theoretical results have shown the existence of a liquid-liquid phase transition in isotropic systems, such as biological solutions and colloids, whose interaction can be represented via an effective potential with a…
Lyotropic liquid crystals can display rich phase behaviour and self-organisation, yet the physical principles underlying their self-assembly into large scale patterns remains understudied. Here, we combine theory, simulations and…
Molecular dynamics simulations have been performed on pure liquid water, aqueous solutions of sodium chloride, and polymer solutions exposed to a strong external electric field with the goal to gain molecular insight into the structural…
Electronic-liquid-crystal phases, in which part of the spatial symmetries are broken spontaneously, are considered to play a vital role in interpreting the structure-property relation in strongly-correlated materials. Although…
Most, but not all, liquid crystals tend to align when subject to shear flow, while most nematic polymeric liquid crystals undergo a tumbling instability, where the director rotate with the flow. The reasons of this instability remain…
We use lattice Boltzmann simulations of the Beris--Edwards formulation of nematodynamics to probe the response of a nematic liquid crystal with conflicting anchoring at the boundaries under shear and Poiseuille flow. The geometry we focus…
It is demonstrated by analyzing real examples that phase transitions in layered crystals occur like all other solid-state phase transitions by nucleation and crystal growth, but have a specific morphology. There the nucleation is epitaxial,…
Structural transitions in melts as well as their dynamics are considered. It is supposed that liquid represents the solution of relatively stable solid-like locally favored structures (LFS) in the surrounding of disordered normal-liquid…
We once more specify an universality of a phase transition from smectic-A to nematic phase in the crosslinked polymer network with a smectic liquid crystal, basing on the X-ray and $^1H$-NMR spectroscopy experiments. Comparing the…
Deformations of amorphous polymer networks prepared with significant concentrations of liquid crystalline mesogens have been recently reported to undergo mechanotropic phase transitions. Here, we report that these mechanotropic phase…
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…
Colloidal gels are out-of-equilibrium structures, made up of a rarefied network of colloidal particles. Comparing experiments to numerical simulations, with hydrodynamic interactions switched off, we demonstrate the crucial role of the…
Achieving control and tunability of lyotropic materials has been a long-standing goal of liquid crystal research. Here we show that the elasticity of a liquid crystal system consisting of a dense suspension of semiflexible biopolymers can…
We study the nuclear liquid-gas phase transition on the basis of a two-component lattice gas model. A Metropolis type of sampling method is used to generate microscopic states in the canonical ensemble. The effective equation of state and…