Related papers: Dynamic Soft Elasticity in Monodomain Nematic Elas…
Control of physical behaviors of nematic colloids and colloidal crystals has been demonstrated by tuning particle shape, topology, chirality and surface charging. However, the capability of altering physical behaviors of such soft matter…
Soft-mode turbulence (SMT) is the spatiotemporal chaos observed in homeotropically aligned nematic liquid crystals, where non-thermal fluctuations are induced by nonlinear coupling between the Nambu-Goldstone and convective modes. The net…
What characterises a solid is its way to respond to external stresses. Ordered solids, such crystals, display an elastic regime followed by a plastic one, both well understood microscopically in terms of lattice distortion and dislocations.…
We show that the fragility $m$, the steepness of the viscosity and relaxation time close to the vitrification, increases with the degree of elastic softening, i.e. the decrease of the elastic modulus with increasing temperature, in…
We derive the effective energy density of thin membranes of liquid crystal elastomers as the Gamma-limit of a widely used bulk model. These membranes can display fine-scale features both due to wrinkling that one expects in thin elastic…
The influence of cyclic loading and glass stability on structural relaxation and yielding transition in amorphous alloys was investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. We considered a binary mixture cooled deep into the glass phase…
We report a dynamic light scattering study of the fluctuation modes in a thermotropic liquid crystalline mixture of monomer and dimer compounds that exhibits the twist-bend nematic ($\mathrm{N_{TB}}$) phase. The results reveal a spectrum of…
In this work, we study the nematic-isotropic phase transition based on the dynamics of the Landau--De Gennes theory of liquid crystals. At the critical temperature, the Landau--De Gennes bulk potential favors the isotropic phase and nematic…
We report studies of the frequency dependent shear modulus, $G^*(\omega)=G'(\omega)+iG''(\omega)$, of the liquid crystal octylcyanobiphenyl (8CB) confined in a colloidal aerosil gel. With the onset of smectic order, $G'$ grows approximately…
We study dynamical optical response of a nematic liquid crystal cell that undergoes the splay-bend transition after applying the voltage across the cell. We formulate a simplified model that takes into account both the flexoelectric…
Rubber elasticity is the archetype of the entropic force emerging from the second law of thermodynamics; numerous experimental and theoretical studies on natural and synthetic rubbers have shown that the elasticity originates mostly from…
We study the dynamics of the solid to liquid transition for a model material made of elastic particles immersed in a viscous fluid. The interaction between particle surfaces includes their viscous lubrication, a sharp repulsion when they…
Rapidly cooling a liquid may result in a glass transition, creating an amorphous solid whose shear and bulk moduli are finite. Even when done with constant density, these resulting moduli depend strongly on the rate of cooling.…
We address the interesting temperature range of a glass forming system where the mechanical properties are intermediate between those of a liquid and a solid. We employ an efficient Monte-Carlo method to calculate the elastic moduli, and…
Models of smectic-C liquid crystal elastomers predict that it can display soft elasticity, in which the shape of the elastomer changes at no energy cost. The amplitude of the soft mode and the accompanying shears are dependent on the…
Understanding the relaxation dynamics of colloidal suspensions is crucial to identify the elements that influence the mobility of their constituents, assess their macroscopic response across the relevant time and length scales, and thus…
We study the relaxation dynamics of a binary Lennard-Jones liquid in the presence of an amorphous wall generated from equilibrium particle configurations. In qualitative agreement with the results presented in Nature Phys. {\bf 8}, 164…
We study the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spin-lattice relaxation rate $1/T_1$ in random one-dimensional spin chains as function of the temperature and disorder strength. In the zero temperature limit, the system displays a…
We show how dynamic heterogeneities (DH), a hallmark of glass-forming materials, depend on chain flexibility and chain length in polymers. For highly flexible polymers, a relatively large number of monomers ($N_c\sim500$) undergo correlated…
We explore a novel strategy of patterning nematic elastomers that does not require inscribing the texture directly. It is based on varying the dopant concentration that, beside shifting the phase transition point, affects the nematic…