Related papers: Parity Breaking in Nematic Tactoids
We theoretically investigate the threshold for the director reorientation from the homeotropic state to the hybrid homeotropic-planar state and vice versa in a cell filled with a flexoelectric nematic liquid crystal (NLC) subjected to an…
Nematic liquid crystals are well modeled as a fluid of rigid rods. Starting from this model, we use a Poisson-bracket formalism to derive the equations governing the dynamics of nematic liquid crystals. We treat the spin angular momentum…
The director configuration of disclination lines in nematic liquid crystals in the presence of an external magnetic field is evaluated. Our method is a combination of a polynomial expansion for the director and of further analytical…
We numerically investigate the rheological response of a non-coalescing multiple emulsion under a symmetric shear flow. We find that the dynamics significantly depends on the magnitude of the shear rate and on the number of the encapsulated…
Liquid shells (e.g. double emulsions, vesicles etc.) are susceptible to interfacial instability and rupturing when driven out of mechanical equilibrium. This poses a significant challenge for the design of liquid shell based micro-machines,…
We explore the ground state phase diagram and nonequilibrium dynamics of genuine two-component particle-imbalanced droplets in both isotropic and anisotropic three-dimensional confinements. A gradual transition from mixed droplet-gas to gas…
Nematic liquid crystals in a polyhedral domain, a prototype for bistable displays, may be described by a unit-vector field subject to tangent boundary conditions. Here we consider the case of a rectangular prism. For configurations with…
Patterning solid surfaces with varying wettability is important to manage droplets in microfluidics, heat transfer and printing. Solid surface roughness poses fundamental limitations including contact-line pinning and solid friction. Here,…
Drop deformation in uniform electric fields is a classic problem. The pioneering work of G.I.Taylor demonstrated that for weakly conducting media, the drop fluid undergoes a toroidal flow and the drop adopts a prolate or oblate spheroidal…
We examine here various aspects of the statics and dynamics of disordered elastic systems such as manifolds and periodic systems. Although these objects look very similar and indeed share some underlying physics, periodic systems constitute…
Topological defects, which are singular points in a director field, play a major role in shaping active systems. Here, we experimentally study topological defects and the flow patterns around them, that are formed during the highly rapid…
In this work we numerically study the switching dynamics of a 2D cholesteric emulsion droplet immersed in an isotropic fluid under an electric field, which is either uniform or rotating with constant speed. The overall dynamics depend…
In classically chaotic systems, small differences in initial conditions are exponentially magnified over time. However, it was observed experimentally that the (necessarily quantum) "branched flow" pattern of electron flux from a quantum…
If a static perturbation is applied to a liquid crystal, the director configuration changes to minimize the free energy. If a shear flow is applied to a liquid crystal, one might ask: Does the director configuration change to minimize any…
The equilibrium properties of polymer droplets on a soft deformable surface are investigated by molecular dynamics simulations of a bead-spring model. The surface consists of a polymer brush with irreversibly end-tethered linear homopolymer…
We theoretically study the nematic ordering transition of rods that are able to elastically adjust their mutually excluded volumes. The model rods, which consist of a hard core surrounded by a deformable shell, mimic the structure of…
Liquid crystal elastomers realize a fascinating new form of soft matter that is a composite of a conventional crosslinked polymer gel (rubber) and a liquid crystal. These {\em solid} liquid crystal amalgams, quite similarly to their…
Liquid crystal elastomers are cross-linked polymer networks covalently bonded with liquid crystal mesogens. In the nematic phase, due to strong coupling between mechanical strain and orientational order, these materials display…
Experimental and modelling study is presented for the effect of a wide range of liquid viscosities on the droplet impact on a smooth solid surface at atmospheric pressure. A non-monotonic variation of threshold between droplet deposition…
In this paper we establish the uniformity property of a simplified Ericksen-Leslie system modelling the hydrodynamics of nematic liquid crystals on the two dimensional unit sphere $S^2$, namely the uniform convergence in $L^2$ to a steady…