Related papers: Phases and Transitions in Phantom Nematic Elastome…
Achieving control and tunability of lyotropic materials has been a long-standing goal of liquid crystal research. Here we show that the elasticity of a liquid crystal system consisting of a dense suspension of semiflexible biopolymers can…
We found that the order for the crumpling transition of an intrinsic curvature model changes depending on the distance between two boundary vertices fixed on the surface of spherical topology. The model is a curvature one governed by an…
A theoretical study of toroidal membranes with various degrees of intrinsic orientational order is presented at mean-field level. The study uses a simple Ginzburg-Landau style free energy functional, which gives rise to a rich variety of…
Only a few years have passed since discovery of polar nematics, and now they are becoming the most actively studied liquid crystal materials. Despite numerous breakthrough findings made recently, a theoretical systematization is still…
Polymerized phantom membranes are revisited using a nonperturbative renormalization group approach. This allows one to investigate both the crumpling transition and the low-temperature, flat, phase in any internal dimension D and embedding…
Active materials are capable of converting free energy into directional motion, giving rise to striking dynamical phenomena. Developing a general understanding of their structure in relation to the underlying non-equilibrium physics would…
We present a model to describe complex phases observed at mesoscopic scales in ultrathin magnetic films. The model is based on the interaction between dipolar as well as quadrupolar magnetic moments. In the special case of strong…
Semiflexible polymers in concentrated lyotropic solution are studied within a bead-spring model by molecular dynamics simulations, focusing on the emergence of a smectic A phase and its properties. We systematically vary the density of the…
We use lattice Boltzmann simulations of the Beris--Edwards formulation of nematodynamics to probe the response of a nematic liquid crystal with conflicting anchoring at the boundaries under shear and Poiseuille flow. The geometry we focus…
The effect of confinement on the orientational structure of a nematic liquid crystal model has been investigated by using a version of density-functional theory (DFT). We have focused on the case of a nematic confined by opposing flat…
Nematics with a broken polar symmetry is one of the fascinating recent discoveries in the field of soft matter. High spontaneous polarisation and the fluidity of the ferroelectric nematic $N_{\mathrm{F}}$ phase make such materials…
We report filling-fraction dependent dielectric spectroscopy measurements on the relaxation dynamics of the rod-like nematogen 7CB condensed in 13 nm silica nanochannels. In the film-condensed regime, a slow interface relaxation dominates…
A nematic liquid crystal confined to the surface of a sphere exhibits topological defects of total charge $+2$ due to the topological constraint. In equilibrium, the nematic field forms four $+1/2$ defects, located at the corners of a…
Physical properties of composite materials can be pre-engineered by controlling their structure and composition at the mesoscale. Yet, approaches for achieving this are limited and rarely scalable. We introduce a new breed of self-assembled…
We study the spontaneous breaking of rotational symmetry in the helical surface state of three-dimensional topological insulators due to strong electron-electron interactions, focusing on time-reversal invariant nematic order. Owing to the…
We investigate the properties of crystalline phantom membranes, at the crumpling transition and in the flat phase, using a nonperturbative renormalization group approach. We avoid a derivative expansion of the effective average action and…
The operation mechanism of nematic liquid crystals lies in the control of their optical properties by the orientation of underlying nematic directors. In analogy, electronic nematicity refers to a state whose electronic properties…
Measurements of the differential elastoresistance of URu$_2$Si$_2$ reveal that the fluctuations associated with the 17 K Hidden Order phase transition have a nematic component. Approaching the "Hidden Order" phase transition from above, the…
We study the organization of topological defects in a system of nematogens confined to the two-dimensional sphere (S^2). We first perform Monte Carlo simulations of a fluid system of hard rods (spherocylinders) living in the tangent plane…
The phase structure of self-avoiding polymerized membranes is studied by extensive Hybrid Monte Carlo simulations. Several folding transitions from the flat to a collapsed state are found. Using a suitable order parameter and finite size…