Related papers: Ordered droplet structures at the liquid crystal s…
Charged colloidal particles trapped at an air--water interface are well known to form an ordered crystal, stabilized by a long ranged repulsion, the details of this repulsion remain something of a mystery, but all experiments performed to…
Suspended microparticles subjected to AC electrical fields collectively organize into band patterns perpendicular to the field direction. The bands further develop into zigzag shaped patterns, in which the particles are observed to…
Capillary interactions have emerged as a tool for the directed assembly of particles adsorbed at fluid-fluid interfaces, and play a role in controlling the mechanical properties of emulsions and foams. In this paper, following Davies et al.…
Liquid crystals formed by acute-angle bent-core (ABC) molecules with a 1,7 naphthalene central core show an intriguing phase behavior with the nematic phase accompanied by poorly understood additional phases. In this work, we characterize…
A new type of a levitating droplet clusters composed of often transforming small aggregates of water droplets is described for the first time. Unlike earlier observed droplet clusters controlled by aerodynamic forces, which formed either an…
Chromonic liquid crystals (CLCs) are lyotropic materials which are attracting growing interest for their adaptability to living systems. A considerable body of works has been devoted to exploring their properties and applications. In this…
Free interfaces of liquid crystals tend to minimise both capillarity and anchoring forces. Here we study nematic films in planar and radial geometries with antagonistic anchoring boundary conditions and one deformable interface. Assuming a…
We introduce a model of chemically active particles of a multi-component fluid that can change their interactions with other particles depending on their state. Since such switching of interactions can only be maintained by the input of…
Outermost occupied electron shells of chemical elements can have symmetries resembling that of monopoles, dipoles, quadrupoles and octupoles corresponding to filled s-, p-, d- and forbitals. Theoretically, elements with hexadecapolar outer…
Colloidal particles suspended in liquid crystals can exhibit various effective anisotropic interactions that can be tuned and utilized in self-assembly processes. We simulate a two-dimensional system of hard disks suspended in a solution of…
Self-assembly of colloidal particles due to elastic interactions in nematic liquid crystals promises tunable composite materials and can be guided by exploiting surface functionalization, geometric shape and topology, though these means of…
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…
Nematic liquid crystals at rough and fluctuating interfaces are analyzed within the Frank elastic theory and the Landau-de Gennes theory. We study specifically interfaces that locally favor planar anchoring. In the first part we reconsider…
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,…
Abundant in nature, colloids also find increasingly important applications in science and technology, ranging from direct probing of kinetics in crystals and glasses to fabrication of third-generation quantum-dot solar cells. Because…
One of the central experimental efforts in nematic colloids research aims to explore how the interplay between the geometry of particles along with the accompanying nematic director deformations and defects around them can provide a means…
This study investigates the clustering behaviour and surface distributions of buoyant particles at the air-water interface in open-channel turbulent flow, focusing on the interplay between capillary attraction, hydrodynamic drag, and…
Using Monte Carlo (MC) computer simulations we explore the self-assembly and ordering behavior of a hybrid, soft magnetic system consisting of small magnetic nano-spheres in a liquid-crystalline (LC) matrix. Inspired by recent experiments…
For partially wetting, ellipsoidal colloids trapped at a fluid interface, their effective, interface--mediated interactions of capillary and fluctuation--induced type are analyzed. For contact angles different from 90$^o$, static interface…
We explore the influence of particle shape on the behavior of evaporating drops. A first set of experiments discovered that particle shape modifies particle deposition after drying. For sessile drops, spheres are deposited in a ring-like…