Related papers: Anomalous coupling between topological defects and…
Topological defects are distinctive signatures of liquid crystals. They profoundly affect the viscoelastic behavior of the fluid by constraining the orientational structure in a way that inevitably requires global changes not achievable…
Drops of active liquid crystal have recently shown the ability to self-propel, which was associated with topological defects in the orientation of active filaments [Sanchez {\em et al.}, Nature {\bf 491}, 431 (2013)]. Here, we study the…
Biological surfaces, such as developing epithelial tissues, exhibit in-plane polar or nematic order and can be strongly curved. Recently, integer (+1) topological defects have been identified as morphogenetic hotspots in living systems.…
We investigated the equilibrium properties of a one-dimensional system of classical particles which interact in pairs through a bounded repulsive potential with a Gaussian shape. Notwithstanding the absence of a proper fluid-solid phase…
A type of super-hydrophobic surface consists of a solid plane boundary with an array of grooves which, due to the effect of surface tension, prevent a complete wetting of the wall. The effect is greatest when the grooves are aligned with…
Shapes of colloids matter at liquid interfaces. We explore the interactions between rough-surfaced nanocolloids at the air--water interface through the compaction of monolayers experimentally and numerically. Sufficiently rough systems…
We study the phase behavior of a classical system of particles interacting through a strictly convex soft-repulsive potential which, at variance with the pairwise softened repulsions considered so far in the literature, lacks a region of…
Charged soft-matter systems--such as colloidal dispersions and charged polymers--are dominated by attractive forces between constituent like-charged particles when neutralizing counterions of high charge valency are introduced. Such…
We consider compact convex hypersurfaces contracting by functions of their curvature. Under the mean curvature flow, uniformly convex smooth initial hypersurfaces evolve to remain smooth and uniformly convex, and contract to points after…
The appealing connection between non-Euclidean geometries and defects in solids is brought forth in this article. Drawing a correspondence between the nature of a defect and a specific geometric property of the material space not only…
We investigate the interaction between highly charged lipid bilayers in the presence of monovalent counterions. Neutron and X-ray reflectivity experiments show that the water layer between like-charged bilayers is thinner than for…
The ion distribution of electrolytes near interfaces with dielectric contrast has important consequences for electrochemical processes and many other applications. To date, most studies of such systems have focused on geometrically simple…
The coupling between two or more objects can generally be categorized as strong or weak. In cavity quantum electrodynamics for example, when the coupling strength is larger than the loss rate the coupling is termed strong, and otherwise it…
Topological defects are found in a variety of systems, and their existence are robust under perturbations due to their topological nature. Here we introduce a new type of topological defects found in electromagnetic waves: topological spin…
The effective potential between charged colloids trapped at water interfaces is analyzed. It consists of a repulsive electrostatic and an attractive capillary part which asymptotically both show dipole--like behavior. For sufficiently large…
We study the mechanical buckling of a two dimensional membrane coated with a thin layer of superfluid. It is seen that a singularity (vortex or anti-vortex defect) in the phase of the quantum order parameter, distorts the membrane metric…
We investigate the topological defects in phenomenological models describing mixtures of charged condensates with commensurate electric charges. Such situations are expected to appear for example in liquid metallic deuterium. This is…
We evaluate how the curvature dependence of surface tension affects the shape of electrically charged interfaces between a perfectly conducting fluid and its vapour. We consider two cases: i) spherical droplets in equilibrium with their…
We demonstrate that higher-order electric susceptibilities in crystals can be enhanced and understood through nontrivial topological invariants and quantum geometry, using one-dimensional $\pi$-conjugated chains as representative model…
We study the effects of surface tension between normal and superfluid regions of a trapped Fermi gas at unitarity. We find that surface tension causes notable distortions in the shape of large aspect ratio clouds. Including these…