Related papers: Tetravalent Colloids by Nematic Wetting
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…
Anisotropic fluids appear in a diverse array of systems, from liquid-crystal displays to bacterial swarms, and are characterized by orientational order. Large colloidal particles immersed in such environments disturb the medium's…
Using laser tweezers and fluorescence confocal polarizing microscopy, we study colloidal interactions of solid microspheres in the nematic bulk caused by elastic distortions around the particles with strong tangential surface anchoring. The…
Knots and knotted fields enrich physical phenomena ranging from DNA and molecular chemistry to the vortices of fluid flows and textures of ordered media. Liquid crystals provide an ideal setting for exploring such topological phenomena…
We predict theoretically the existence of a class of colloidal structures in nematic liquid crystal (NLC) cells, which are induced by surface patterns on the plates of the cell (like cells with UV-irradiated polyimide surfaces using micron…
Liquid crystals are assemblies of rod-like molecules which self-organize to form mesophases, in-between ordinary liquids and anisotropic crystals. At each point, the molecules collectively orient themselves along a privileged direction,…
We have studied, using molecular dynamics simulations, the pressure-induced melting in a monolayer of soft repulsive spherocylinders whose centers of mass are constrained to move on the surface of a sphere. We show that the orientational…
We show that the relative stability of the nematic tetratic phase with respect to the usual uniaxial nematic phase can be greatly enhanced by clustering effects. Two--dimensional rectangles of aspect ratio $\kappa$ interacting via hard…
Close to sinusoidal substrates, simple fluids may undergo a filling transition, in which the fluid passes from a dry to a filled state, where the interface remains unbent but bound to the substrate. Increasing the surface field, the…
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,…
Smectic liquid crystals are charcterized by layers that have a preferred uniform spacing and vanishing curvature in their ground state. Dislocations in the smectics play an important role in phase nucleation, layer reorientation, and…
We design a nematic collider for controlled out-of-equilibrium anisotropic aggregation of spherical colloidal particles. The nematic surrounding imparts dipolar interactions among the spheres. A bidirectional backflow of the nematic liquid…
The generalization of the Nelson-Halperin-Young theory of 2D melting to the dynamical 2+1D quantum case is presented. The bosonic quantum crystal dualizes in superfluids or superconductors exhibiting nematic liquid crystalline orders,…
In this study, we demonstrate that when a ferroelectric nematic is confined between two glass plates coated with ionic polymers, a modulated phase emerges in a narrow temperature range between the nematic and ferroelectric nematic phases.…
We discover three-dimensional intertwined Weyl phases, by developing a theory to create topological phases. The theory is based on intertwining existing topological gapped and gapless phases protected by the same crystalline symmetry. The…
Cholesteric liquid crystals can exhibit spatial patterns in molecular alignment at interfaces that can be exploited for particle assembly. These patterns emerge from the competition between bulk and surface energies, tunable with the system…
Colloidal particles dispersed in a partially ordered medium, such as a liquid crystal (LC) phase, disturb its alignment and are subject to elastic forces. These forces are long-ranged, anisotropic and tunable through temperature or external…
We investigate two-dimensional (2d) melting in the presence of a one-dimensional (1d) periodic potential as, for example, realized in recent experiments on 2d colloids subjected to two interfering laser beams. The topology of the phase…
The transition from a nematic to an isotropic state in a self-closing spherical liquid crystal shell with tangential alignment is a stimulating phenomenon to investigate, as the topology dictates that the shell exhibits local isotropic…
The properties of liquid crystals can be modelled using an order parameter which describes the variability of the local orientation of rod-like molecules. Defects in the director field can arise due to external factors such as applied…