Related papers: Phase chirality and stereo-selective swelling of c…
Active elastomeric liquid crystal particles with initial cylindrical shapes are obtained by means of soft lithography and polymerization in a strong magnetic field. Gold nanocrystals infiltrated into these particles mediate energy transfer…
A state of matter in which molecules show a long-range orientational order and no positional order is called a nematic liquid crystal. The best known and most widely used (for example, in modern displays) is the uniaxial nematic, with the…
We put forward an enantioselective method for chiral nanoparticles using optical tweezers. We demonstrate that the optical trapping force in a typical, realistic optical tweezing setup with circularly-polarized trapping beams is sensitive…
I describe new phases of a chiral liquid crystal with nematic and hexatic order. I find a conical phase, similar to that of a cholesteric in an applied magnetic field for Frank elastic constants $K_2>K_3$. I discuss the role of fluctuations…
General symmetry arguments, dating back to de Gennes dictate that at scales longer than the pitch, the low-energy elasticity of a chiral nematic liquid crystal (cholesteric) and of a Dzyaloshinskii-Morya (DM) spiral state in a helimagnet…
The work is devoted to the self-action of laser beams propagating in the isotropic phase of a cholesteric liquid crystal near the transition temperature to the mesophase in a wide range of parameter values characterizing the nonlocality of…
We report on X-ray studies of freely suspended hexatic films of three different liquid crystal compounds. By applying angular X-ray cross-correlation analysis (XCCA) to the measured diffraction patterns the parameters of the…
Chirality in polymeric systems enables a wide range of emergent optical, mechanical, and transport phenomena, yet a unified framework that quantitatively connects molecular-scale geometry to chiral behavior remains lacking. Existing…
Self-organisation into spatially modulated structures has different nature from phase transition into uniform states. Skyrmions and half-skyrmions (merons) are representatives of such structures and are utilised in designing…
The influence of a stationary shear flow on the crystallization in a glassy system is studied by means of molecular dynamics simulations and subsequent cluster analysis. The results reveal two opposite effects of the shear flow on the…
We theoretically investigate into the effects of the incidence angles in light transmission of cholesteric liquid crystal two-layer sandwich structures with twist defects created by rotation of the one layer about the helical axis.The…
Using both experiments and finite element simulations, we explore the shape evolution of off-axis nematic elastomer ribbons as a function of temperature. The elastomers are prepared by cross-linking the mesogens with planar anchoring of the…
Chirality governs phenomena ranging from chemical reactions to the topology of quasiparticle charge carriers. However, a direct macroscopic probe for crystal chirality remains a significant challenge, especially in time reversal symmetric…
The phase-ordering kinetics of a bulk uniaxial nematic liquid crystal is addressed using techniques that have been successfully applied to describe ordering in the O(n) model. The method involves constructing an appropriate mapping between…
We analyse the elastic energy of an intercalated smectic where orientationally ordered polymers with an average orientation varying from layer to layer are intercalated between smectic planes. The lowest order terms in the coupling between…
Colloidal particles dispersed in liquid crystals can form new materials with tunable elastic and electro-optic properties. In a periodic `blue phase' host, particles should template into colloidal crystals with potential uses in photonics,…
This paper is concerned with the dynamics of a binary mixture of rod--like, repulsive colloidal particles driven out of equilibrium by means of a steady shear flow (Couette geometry). To this end we first derive, starting from a microscopic…
Chirality is a recurrent theme in the study of biological systems, in which active processes are driven by the internal conversion of chemical energy into work. Bacterial flagella, acto-myosin filaments and microtubule bundles are active…
The local and global dynamics of a sheared granular medium are studied in a model experiment as a function of several macroscopic parameters. We observe that by changing the shear rate or the loading stiffness, the system crackles, with…
For monodomain nematic elastomers, we construct generalised elastic-nematic constitutive models combining purely elastic and neoclassical-type strain-energy densities. Inspired by recent developments in stochastic elasticity, we extend…