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The cubic blue phases of liquid crystals are fascinating and technologically promising examples of hierarchically structured soft materials, comprising ordered networks of defect lines (disclinations) within a liquid crystalline matrix. We…
Ferroelectric nematics present properties promising for applications, which strongly depend on the confinement conditions and the presence of defects. In this work, we have observed and analysed textures in the cells with homogeneous…
We study stability and distortions of liquid crystal nematic order in a cell with a random heterogeneous substrate. Modeling this system as a bulk xy model with quenched disorder confined to a surface, we find that nematic order is…
Nematicity is a well known property of liquid crystals and has been recently discussed in the context of strongly interacting electrons. An electronic nematic phase has been seen by many experiments in certain strongly correlated materials,…
Designing smart devices with tunable shapes has important applications in industrial manufacture. In this paper, we investigate the nonlinear deformation and the morphological transitions between buckling, necking, and snap-through…
As in between liquid and crystal phases lies a nematic liquid crystal, which breaks rotation with preservation of translation symmetry, there is a nematic superfluid phase bridging a superfluid and a supersolid. The nematic order also…
Orientational and positional ordering properties of liquid crystal monolayers are examined by means of Fundamental-Measure Density Functional Theory. Particles forming the monolayer are modeled as hard parallelepipeds of square section of…
A theory of thermotropic nematic liquid crystals in which molecules form internally ordered clusters is presented. The formulation is based on the same mean field approximation and form of the anisotropic potential used in the Maier-Saupe…
We show how to obtain all the models of the continuous description of membranes by constructing the appropriate non-linear realizations of the Euclidean symmetries of the embedding. The procedure has the advantage of giving a unified…
Within the framework of continuum theory, we draw a parallel between ferromagnetic materials and nematic liquid crystals confined on curved surfaces, which are both characterized by local interaction and anchoring potentials. We show that…
We predict the existence of a new defect-lattice phase near the nematic - smectic-C (NC) transition. This tilt- analogue of the blue phase is a lattice of double-tilt cylinders. We discuss the structure and stability of the cone phase. We…
We report on fast electro-optic switching (response time 0.1 ms) of a blue-phase-polymer templated nematic with a broad-temperature range of thermodynamic stability and hysteresis-free performance. The nematic fills a polymer template that…
The interplay between different orders is of fundamental importance in physics. The spontaneous, symmetry-breaking charge order, responsible for the stripe or the nematic phase, has been of great interest in many contexts where strong…
The recently discovered ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals have been reported to exhibit very large dielectric permittivity values. Here, we report a systematic investigation of the dielectric behavior of a prototypical ferroelectric…
In this paper we investigate the phase diagram of a dumbbell model composed of two hard-core soft-corona beads through $NpT$ simulations. This particular system was chosen due to its ability to exhibit a diverse range of stripe patterns.…
Topological defects in systems with liquid-crystalline order are crucial in determining their large-scale properties. In active systems, they are known to have properties impossible at equilibrium: for example, $+1/2$ defects in…
There is a recent interest in studying odd elasticity in soft solids. Current focus has been on simple solids. However, many soft solids are structured and can exhibit nematic elasticity or viscoelasticity. Here we generalize the concept of…
Colloids dispersed in nematic liquid crystals form topological composites in which colloid-associated defects mediate interactions while adhering to fundamental topological constraints. Better realising the promise of such materials…
Nematic elastomers are rubbery solids which have liquid crystals incorporated into their polymer chains. These materials display many unusual mechanical properties, one such being the ability to form fine-scale microstructure. In this work,…
Active forces occurring within cells can drive crucial biological processes that involve spontaneous organization and shape change, such as cell division. Motivated by recent in vitro experiments of nematic droplets of cytoskeletal…