Related papers: Textural transformations in islands on free standi…
Smectic liquid crystal films a few molecular layers thick that are freely suspended in air are used as a model system to study the coalescence of fluids in two dimensions. High-speed video microscopy is used to observe the coalescence of…
Curved textures of ferroelectric smectic C* liquid crystals produce space charge when they involve divergence of the spontaneous polarization field. Impurity ions can partially screen this space charge, reducing long range interactions to…
We report on a new experimental procedure for forming and studying polar smectic liquid crystal films. A free standing smectic film is put in contact with a liquid drop, so that the film has one liquid crystal/liquid interface and one…
We report a detailed theoretical analysis of novel quadrupolar interactions observed between islands, which are disk-like inclusions of extra layers, floating in thin, freely suspended smectic C liquid crystal films. Strong tangential…
We investigate the formation and the coarsening dynamics of islands in a strained epitaxial semi-conductor film. These islands are commonly observed in thin films undergoing a morphological instability due to the presence of the elasto…
We demonstrate spontaneous wrinkling as a transient dynamical pattern in thin freely floating smectic liquid-crystalline films. The peculiarity of such films is that, while flowing liquid-like in the film plane, they cannot quickly expand…
The known ground state of ultrathin smectic films confined to the surface of a sphere is described by four +1/2 defects assembled on a great circle and a director which follows geodesic lines. Using a simple perturbative approach we show…
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…
We present detailed systematic studies of structural transformations in thin liquid crystal films with the smectic-C to hexatic phase transition. For the first time all possible structures reported in the literature are observed for one…
We study the morphological evolution of strained islands in growing crystal films by use of a continuum description including wetting, elasticity and deposition flux. Wetting breaks translational invariance, allowing the flux to tune…
We use Monte-Carlo simulations to study island formation in the growth of thin semiconducting films deposited on lattice-mismatched substrates. It is known that islands nucleate with critical nuclei of about one atom and grow two…
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 existence of "superconducting islands" (i.e., locally confined regions with superconducting correlations) in amorphous superconducting thin films can account for numerous experimental findings. Such spatial fluctuations in the…
Island formation in strain-free heteroepitaxial deposition of thin films is analyzed using kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of two minimal lattice models and scaling approaches. The transition from layer-by-layer (LBL) to island (ISL) growth…
We consider a variational model for the formation of islands in heteroepitaxial growth on unbounded domains. We first derive the scaling regimes of the minimal energy in terms of the volume of the film and the amplitude of the…
Morphological properties of strained epitaxial films are examined through a mesoscopic approach developed to incorporate both the film crystalline structure and standard continuum theory. Film surface profiles and properties, such as…
Chiral nematic liquid crystals exhibit both a helical planar ground state with uniform twist and a metastable defect-rich focal conic texture, and can be switched between the two microstructures via application of transient voltage pulses.…
Free interfaces of liquid crystals tend to minimise both capillarity and anchoring forces. Here we study nematic films in planar and radial geometries with antagonistic anchoring boundary conditions and one deformable interface. Assuming a…
Ring patterns of concentric 2pi-solitons in molecular orientation, form in freely suspended chiral smectic-C films in response to an in-plane rotating electric field. We present measurements of the zero-field relaxation of ring patterns and…
We consider the shape evolution of two-dimensional islands on a crystal surface in the regime where mass transport is exclusively along the island edge. A directed mass current due to surface electromigration causes the island to migrate in…