Related papers: Parity Breaking in Nematic Tactoids
Morphogenesis of living systems involves topological shape transformations which are highly unusual in the inanimate world. Here we demonstrate that a droplet of a nematic liquid crystal changes its equilibrium shape from a simply-connected…
Motivated by recent experiments, the isotropic-nematic phase transition in chromonic liquid crystals is studied. As temperature decreases, nematic nuclei nucleate, grow, and coalesce, giving rise to tactoid microstructures in an isotropic…
We investigate the nonlinear parity-time (PT) symmetric coupler from a dynamical perspective. As opposed to linear PT-coupler where the PT threshold dictates the evolutionary characteristics of optical power in the two waveguides, in a…
We numerically study the effect of an active turbulent environment on a passive deformable droplet. The system is simulated using coupled hydrodynamic and nematodynamic equations for nematic liquid crystals with an active stress which is…
Within the Landau-de Gennes theory of liquid crystals, we study theoretically the equilibrium configurations with uniaxial symmetry. We show that the uniaxial symmetry constraint is very restrictive and can in general not be satisfied,…
We study the effect of the interplay between parity-time ($\mathcal{PT}$) symmetry and optical lattice (OL) potential on dynamics of quantum droplets (QDs) forming in a binary bosonic condensate trapped in a dual-core system. It is found…
We simulate the response of a particle-stabilized emulsion droplet in an external force field, such as gravity, acting equally on all $N$ particles. We show that the field strength required for breakup (at fixed initial area fraction)…
In experiments and numerical simulations we measured angles between the symmetry axes of small spheroids advected in turbulence ("passive directors"). Since turbulent strains tend to align nearby spheroids, one might think that their…
We investigate the robustness of parity- and time-reversal ($\mP\mT$) symmetric phase in an $N$-site lattice with position-dependent, parity-symmetric hopping function and a pair of imaginary, $\mP\mT$-symmetric impurities. We find that the…
Most, but not all, liquid crystals tend to align when subject to shear flow, while most nematic polymeric liquid crystals undergo a tumbling instability, where the director rotate with the flow. The reasons of this instability remain…
Confining a liquid crystal imposes topological constraints on the orientational order, allowing global control of equilibrium systems by manipulation of anchoring boundary conditions. In this article, we investigate whether a similar…
We present a generalized approach to compute the shape and internal structure of two-dimensional nematic domains. By using conformal mappings, we are able to compute the director field for a given domain shape that we choose from a rich…
Directional solidification of water-based solutions has emerged as a versatile technique to template hierarchical porous materials, but this nonequilibrium process remains incompletely understood. Here we use phase-field simulations to shed…
We study geometrically-controlled twist transitions of a nematic confined between a sinusoidal grating and a flat substrate. In these cells the transition to the twisted state is driven by surface effects. We have identified the mechanisms…
Coupling between flow and orientation is a central issue in understanding the collective dynamics of active biofilaments and cells. Active stresses generated by motor activity destroy (quasi-)long-range orientational order and induce…
Droplet breakup is important in many natural and industrial processes, but the current classification of breakup regimes, especially the intermediate breakup regime, is ambiguous. In this study, the transitions of breakup regimes for…
We present a theoretical study of the director fields and energetics of nematic liquid crystal shells with two pairs of surface defects. The pairs of defects can undergo abrupt transitions between a configuration of maximum separation to at…
Topological defects are ubiquitous on surfaces with orientational order fields. Here, we study equilibrium states generated by the feedback between geometry and nematic order on fluid membranes with an integer topological defect. When the…
By analyzing elastic theory for nematic liquid crystals, we distinguish three regimes of elastic constants. In one regime, the Ericksen inequalities are satisfied, and the ground state of the director field is uniform. In a second regime,…
We study static distributions of ferrofluid submitted to non-uniform magnetic fields. We show how the normal-field instability is modified in the presence of a weak magnetic field gradient. Then we consider a ferrofluid droplet and show how…