Related papers: Polar Molecular Organisation in Liquid Crystals
A promising approach in designing composite materials with unusual physical behavior combines solid nanostructures and orientationally ordered soft matter at the mesoscale. Such composites not only inherit properties of their constituents…
Electric dipoles of water molecules, enclosed singly in regularly spaced nanopores of a cordierite crystal, become ordered at low temperature due to their mutual interaction and show the frequency dependence of their dielectric…
Population heterogeneity is ubiquitous among active living systems, but little is known about its role in determining their spatial organization and large-scale dynamics. Combining evidence from synthetic active fluids assembled from…
Modeling the dielectric behavior of molecular materials made up of large pi-conjugated molecules is an interesting and complex task. Here we address linear polarizabilities, and the related dielectric constant, of molecular crystals and…
How thousands of microtubules and molecular motors self-organize into spindles remains poorly understood. By combining static, nanometer-resolution, large-scale electron tomography reconstructions and dynamic, optical-resolution, polarized…
The recent discovery of ferroelectric nematic liquid crystalline phases marks a major breakthrough in soft matter research. An intermediate phase, often observed between the nonpolar and the ferroelectric nematic phase, shows a distinct…
The recent experimental discovery of ferroelectric and splay nematic phases has sparked interest in comprehending the crucial molecular features necessary to stabilize these innovative structures. This study advances the ongoing discourse…
We show in simulations that a rich variety of novel orderings such as pinwheel and star states can be realized for colloidal molecular crystal mixtures at rational ratios of the number of colloids to the number of minima from an underlying…
We present an approach to electronic polarization in molecular solids treated as a set of quantum systems interacting classically. Individual molecules are dealt with rigorously as quantum-mechanical systems subject to classical external…
A number of highly polar three ring rod-shaped compounds with a terminal thiophene ring have been synthesized and the physical properties of a subset are reported in detail. On cooling from the isotropic fluid, they directly transition to a…
We analyze the behavior of a suspension of active polar particles under shear. In the absence of external forces, orientationally ordered active particles are known to exhibit a transition to a state of non-uniform polarization and…
We study the dynamical properties of active polar liquid crystalline films. Like active nematic films, active polar films undergo a dynamical transitions to spontaneously flowing steady-states. Spontaneous flow in polar fluids is, however,…
Melting of two-dimensional (2D) equilibrium crystals, from superconducting vortex lattices to colloidal structures, is a complex phenomenon characterized by the sequential loss of positional and orientational order. Whereas melting…
A thorough investigation of single crystalline magnetite using broadband dielectric spectroscopy and other methods provides evidence for relaxor-like polar order in Fe3O4. We find long-range ferroelectric order to be im-peded by the…
Curved particles have been shown to stabilize a range of states with unique order in dense suspensions of colloidal bent core liquid crystals. The shape of the colloidal rods encourages the formation of curved director fields. However,…
Nucleation is an activated process in which the system has to overcome a free energy barrier in order for a first-order phase transition between the metastable and the stable phases to take place. In the liquid-to-solid transition the…
We discuss some interesting physical features stemming from our previous analytical study of a simple model of a fluid with dipolar-like interactions of very short range in addition to the usual isotropic Baxter potential for adhesive…
We study colloidal ordering and disordering on two-dimensional periodic substrates where the number of colloids per substrate minima is two or three. The colloids form dimer or trimer states with orientational ordering, referred to as…
We investigate the ordering properties of vertically-vibrated monolayers of granular cylinders in a circular container at high packing fraction. In line with previous works by other groups, we identify liquid-crystalline ordering behaviour…
The combination of large spontaneous polarization and fluidity makes the newly discovered ferroelectric nematic liquid crystalline phase (NF) responsive to electric fields in ways that have no counterpart in other materials. We probe this…