Related papers: Dipolar interactions, molecular flexibility, and f…
We have numerically studied a liquid composed of achiral, bent-shaped molecules built of tangent spheres. The system is known to spontaneously break mirror symmetry, as it forms a macroscopically chiral, twist-bend nematic phase [Phys. Rev.…
We have used Monte Carlo NPT computer simulations to study a system of spherical fan shaped particles made of three hard discs fused along a common diameter. The calculated equation of state indicates a strong, entropy driven, first order…
The recently discovered ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals have been reported to exhibit very large dielectric permittivity values. Here, we report a systematic investigation of the dielectric behavior of a prototypical ferroelectric…
Semiflexible polymers in concentrated lyotropic solution are studied within a bead-spring model by molecular dynamics simulations, focusing on the emergence of a smectic A phase and its properties. We systematically vary the density of the…
We have calculated the phase diagrams of one--component fluids made of five types of biaxial particles differing in their cross sections. The orientation of the principal particle axis is fixed in space, while the second axis is allowed to…
Monte Carlo simulations at constant pressure are performed to study coexistence and interfacial properties of the liquid-solid transition in hard spheres and in colloid-polymer mixtures. The latter system is described as a one-component…
Mesogenic dimers in the twist-bend nematic phase exhibit much higher flexoelectric polarization than in their uniform nematic phase. In order to theoretically investigate this data, we extend the symmetry based linear elastic theory of the…
Liquid crystals formed by acute-angle bent-core (ABC) molecules with a 1,7 naphthalene central core show an intriguing phase behavior with the nematic phase accompanied by poorly understood additional phases. In this work, we characterize…
Microbullet particles, cylinders with one blunt and one spherical end, offer a novel platform to study the effects of anisotropy and curvature on colloidal assembly in complex fluids. Here, we disperse microbullets in…
By Monte Carlo simulations of a soft ellipsoid model for liquid crystals, we study whether a layer of grafted liquid-crystalline chain molecules can induce tilt in a nematic fluid. The chains are fairly short (four monomers) and made of the…
We perform Monte Carlo simulations of a simplified two-dimensional model for colloidal hard spheres in an external uniaxial AC electric field. Experimentally, the external field induces dipole moments in the colloidal particles, which in…
We investigate the phase ordering (pattern formation) of systems of two-dimensional core-shell particles using Monte-Carlo (MC) computer simulations and classical density functional theory (DFT). The particles interact via a pair potential…
Chiral liquid crystals often exhibit periodic modulations in the molecular director; in particular, thin films of the smectic-C* phase show a chiral striped texture. Here, we investigate whether similar chiral modulations can occur in the…
The quantitative understanding of membranes is still rooted in work performed in the 1970s by Helfrich and others, concerning amphiphilic bilayers. However, most biological membranes contain a wide variety of nonamphiphilic molecules too.…
Dielectric spectroscopy of a twist bend nematic phase of an achiral bent core liquid crystalline compound under DC bias is used to investigate its response to electric field. Two collective relaxation processes are revealed, these are…
We study the layer-to-layer diffusion in smectic-A liquid crystals of colloidal hard rods with different length-to-diameter ratios using computer simulations. The layered arrangement of the smectic phase yields a hopping-type diffusion due…
We consider a theoretical model for a binary mixture of colloidal particles and spherical emulsion droplets. The hard sphere colloids interact via additional short-ranged attraction and long-ranged repulsion. The droplet-colloid interaction…
The strengths and short-comings of the point-dipole model for polar fluids of spherical molecules are illustrated by considering the physically more relevant case of extended dipoles formed by two opposite charges $\pm q$ separated by a…
Using Monte Carlo simulations, we investigate the structural characteristics of an interacting hard sphere system with shifted charge to elucidate the effect of the non-centrosymmetric interaction on its phase behavior. Two different phase…
Employing simplified models in computer simulation is on the one hand often enforced by computer time limitations but on the other hand it offers insights into the molecular properties determining a given physical phenomenon. We employ this…