Related papers: Dynamics of cholesteric structures in an electric …
An unresolved issue in the theory of liquid crystals is the molecular basis of the electroclinic effect in the smectic-A phase. Recent x-ray scattering experiments suggest that, in a class of siloxane-containing liquid crystals, an electric…
We reformulate the Leslie effects that describe the dynamic cross-couplings in chiral liquid crystals driven by the transport of heat, electric charge, and mass. The Ericksen--Leslie model is extended in the linear response framework by…
New experimental results and their physical analysis are presented to clarify the behavior of a relatively stable self-arranged droplet cluster levitating over the locally heated water surface. An external electric field of both opposite…
Most of crystalline materials exhibit a hysteresis on their deformation curve when mechanically loaded in alternating directions. This Bauschinger effect is the signature of mechanisms existing at the atomic scale and controlling the…
Stably stratified layers are thought to develop at the top of the liquid metallic cores of many terrestrial planets. We consider the case where the thermal gradient is stable but the compositional gradient is unstable, a situation…
Rafts, or functional domains, are transient nano- or mesoscopic structures in the plasma membrane and are thought to be essential for many cellular processes such as signal transduction, adhesion, trafficking and lipid/protein sorting.…
In this paper, we speculate on a possible application of Liquid Crystal Elastomers to the field of soft robotics. In particular, we study a concept for limbless locomotion that is amenable to miniaturisation. For this purpose, we formulate…
We report on the dynamics of a conducting domain wall under applied dc and ac voltages. These dynamics are modeled for a thin film that hosts an ideal charged domain wall via a combination of time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau equations for the…
We investigate the charge transport properties of a relativistic drifting plasma using the kinetic theory within the relaxation time approximation. The collective drift induced by electromagnetic fields is described in terms of a suitably…
Magneto-optical effects in structured anisotropic media have attracted significant attention due to their potential in tunable photonic devices. In particular, dichroic cholesteric liquid crystals (i.e., cholesterics in which the real parts…
Two kinds of electroconvection (EC) patterns in an ether-bridged bent-core nematic liquid crystal material (BCN), which appear in different frequency ranges, are examined and compared in this paper. One is a longitudinal pattern with the…
We investigate theoretically the wetting properties of cholesteric liquid crystals at a planar substrate. If the properties of substrate and of the interface are such that the cholesteric layers are not distorted the wetting properties are…
We characterize the director structures in electroconvection patterns of nematic liquid crystals by means of polarising microscopy. This study was stimulated by a theory put forward by Rossberg et al. (patt-sol/9701005) who propose a…
A dynamic diffraction theory is developed for describing electron diffraction by dielectric crystals in a strong electromagnetic field. It is shown that additional diffraction maxima arise in an electromagnetic field, their intensity…
We experimentally demonstrate the phenomenon of electroosmotic dipole flow that occurs around a localized surface charge region under the application of an external electric field in a Hele-Shaw cell. We use localized deposition of…
We consider the millimeter-wave electrodynamics specific to quasi-two-dimensional conductors and superconductors based on the organic donor molecule BEDT-TTF. Using realistic physical parameters, we examine the current polarizations that…
We use the electromagnetic stress tensor to describe the elongation of paramagnetic drops in uniform magnetic fields. This approach implies a linear relationship between the shape of the drops and the square of the applied field which we…
The recent discovery of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking has demonstrated the possibility of discovering the exotic textures of ferromagnetic systems in liquid crystalline fluid ferro-electrics. We show that the polar smectic mesophase…
Motivated by the notion that a preponderance of Coulomb interactions might lead to hydrodynamics, we carry out an ab initio calculation of the charge carrier transport properties of the electron-hole plasma of doped graphene. We include…
Active components incorporated in materials generate motion by inducing conformational changes in response to external fields. Magnetic fields are particularly interesting as they can actuate materials remotely. Millimeter-sized ferrofluid…