Related papers: Virtual surfaces, director domains and the Freeder…
Much is known about the Freedericksz transition induced by uniform electric and magnetic fields in nematic liquid crystals. Here we study the effects of a spatially varying field on the transition. We study the response of a nematic to a…
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…
The multidimensional energy surface of a cholesteric liquid crystal in a planar cell is investigated as a function of spherical coordinates determining the director orientation. Minima on the energy surface correspond to the stable states…
Fr\'eedericksz transitions in nematic liquid crystals are re-examined with a focus on differences between systems with magnetic fields and those with electric fields. A magnetic field can be treated as uniform in a liquid-crystal medium;…
Systems involving nematic liquid crystals subjected to magnetic fields or electric fields are modeled using the Oseen-Frank macroscopic continuum theory, and general criteria are developed to assess the local stability of equilibrium…
We study the interplay between the fluid-crystal transition and the glass transition of elastic sphere system with polydispersity using nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. It is found that the end point of the crystal-fluid…
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…
The solid nematic equivalent of the Fredericks transition is found to depend on a critical field rather than a critical voltage as in the classical case. This arises because director anchoring is principally to the solid rubbery matrix of…
In this paper we describe domain walls appearing in a thin, nematic liquid crystal sample subject to an external field with intensity close to the Fr\'eedericksz transition threshold. Using the gradient theory of the phase transition…
We study light transmission through a homeotropically oriented nematic liquid crystal cell and solve self-consistently a nonlinear equation for the nematic director coupled to Maxwell's equations. We demonstrate that above a certain…
Theoretical study of dynamical phenomena induced by a linearly polarized plane wave incident perpendicularly on a planar aligned nematic layer with the light intensity as the control parameter is reported. We find the threshold of the…
These notes are devoted to the statistical mechanics of directed polymers interacting with one-dimensional spatial defects. We are interested in particular in the situation where frozen disorder is present. These polymer models undergo a…
Liquid crystal elastomers are cross-linked polymer networks covalently bonded with liquid crystal mesogens. In the nematic phase, due to strong coupling between mechanical strain and orientational order, these materials display…
We present an analysis of heterogeneous dynamics in molecular dynamics simulations of a thin polymeric film, supported by an absorbing structured surface. Near the glass transition "immobile" domains occur throughout the film, yet the…
The structural arrest of a polymeric suspension might be driven by an increase of the cross--linker concentration, that drives the gel transition, as well as by an increase of the polymer density, that induces a glass transition. These…
Successful realization of ferromagnetic nematic liquid crystals has opened up the possibility to experimentally study a completely new set of fundamental physical phenomena. In this contribution we present a detailed investigation of some…
We study pressurised self-avoiding ring polymers in two dimensions using Monte Carlo simulations, scaling arguments and Flory-type theories, through models which generalise the model of Leibler, Singh and Fisher [Phys. Rev. Lett. Vol. 59,…
Liquid crystals in two dimensions undergo a first-order isotropic-to-quasi-nematic transition, provided the particle interactions are sufficiently ``sharp and narrow''. This implies phase coexistence between isotropic and quasi-nematic…
We study the glass and jamming transition of finite-dimensional models of simple liquids: hard- spheres, harmonic spheres and more generally bounded pair potentials that modelize frictionless spheres in interaction. At finite temperature,…
The dynamic transition between the ordered flow and the plastic flow is studied for a two-dimensional driven vortex lattice, in the presence of sharp and dense pinning centers, from numerical simulations. For this system, which does not…