Related papers: Telephone-cord instabilities in thin smectic capil…
Topological spin and polar textures have fascinated people in different areas of physics and technologies. However, the observations are limited in magnetic and solid-state ferroelectric systems. Ferroelectric nematic is the first…
We study amorphous solids with strong elastic disorder and find an un-jamming instability that exists, inter alia, in an harmonic model built using Euclidean random matrices (ERM). Employing the Zwanzig-Mori projection operator formalism…
Using air to displace a viscous fluid contained in Hele-Shaw cell can create a fingering pattern at the interface between the fluids, if the capillary number exceeds a critical value. This Saffman-Taylor instability is revisited for the…
Using tools and concepts from contact topology we show that non-vanishing twist implies conservation of the layer structure in cholesteric liquid crystals. This leads to a number of additional topological invariants for cholesteric…
Rod-like objects at high packing fractions can form smectic phases, where the rods break rotational and translational symmetry by forming lamellae. Smectic defects thereby include both discontinuities in the rod orientational order…
Liquid crystals formed of bent-core molecules are exotic materials that exhibit the twist-bend nematic phase. This arises when an energetic preference for nonzero local bend distortion is accommodated via twist in the texture, resulting in…
It was recently conjectured that, in SU(3) gauge theories with fundamental quarks, valence spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking is equivalent to condensation of local dynamical chirality and appearance of chiral polarization scale…
In this Letter we discuss theoretically the instabilities of thermotropic freely standing smectic-A films under shear flow\cite{re:wu}. We show that, in Couette geometry, the centrifugal force pushes the liquid crystal toward the outer…
Nematic twist--bend is the fifth nematic phase recognized in nature. This phase exhibits spiral orientational order, thus it is a chiral structure and it can be stabilized in systems composed of achiral molecules. The microscopic origin of…
A number of dense particle suspensions experience a dramatic increase in viscosity with the shear stress, up to a solid-like response. This shear-thickening process is understood as a transition under flow of the nature of the contacts,…
We investigate nonreciprocal electrical transport in bulk single-crystalline Mo3Al2C, a material known to host crystallographic chirality, a polar charge-density-wave instability, and a superconducting transition near 8 K. Using AC…
We have examined theoretically the spontaneous thinning process of tip-suspended nanowires, and subsequently studied the structure and stability of the monatomic gold wires recently observed by Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM). The…
Within the framework of a semi-microscopic interface displacement model we analyze the linear stability of sessile ridges and drops of a non-volatile liquid on a homogeneous, partially wet substrate, for both signs and arbitrary amplitudes…
Chiral $d$-wave superconductivity has been proposed in a number of different materials, but characteristic experimental fingerprints have been largely lacking. We show that quadruply quantized coreless vortices are prone to form and offer…
This paper examines thermodynamic stability of chiral domain walls and vortices - topological defects which can exist in chiral superconductors. Using London theory it is demonstrated that at sufficiently small applied and chiral fields the…
The geometric shape, symmetry, and topology of colloidal particles often allow for controlling colloidal phase behavior and physical properties of these soft matter systems. In liquid crystalline dispersions, colloidal particles with low…
We consider director configurations of cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) cells with two plane confining substrates. Exact solutions of the Euler-Lagrange equations for out-of-plane orientations of the easy axes that correspond to…
Chirality is an important concept that describes the asymmetry property of a system, which usually emerges spontaneously due to mirror symmetry breaking. Such spontaneous chirality manifests predominantly as parity breaking in modern…
Handedness of the director twist in cholesteric liquid crystals is commonly assumed to be the same throughout the medium, determined solely by the chirality of constituent molecules or chiral additives, albeit distortions of the…
Motivated by experiments on colloidal membranes composed of chiral rod-like viruses, we use Monte Carlo methods to determine the phase diagram for the liquid crystalline order of the rods and the membrane shape. We generalize the…