Related papers: Boundary-roughness effects in nematic liquid cryst…
Topological defects play a pivotal role in the physics of liquid crystals and represent one of the most prominent and well studied aspects of mesophases. While in two-dimensional nematics, disclinations are traditionally treated as…
We study spreading dynamics of nematic liquid crystal droplets within the framework of the long-wave approximation. A fourth order nonlinear parabolic partial differential equation governing the free surface evolution is derived. The…
We investigate the effects of extrinsic curvature on the turbulent behavior of a 2D active nematic confined to the surface of a cylinder. The surface of a cylinder has no intrinsic curvatrue and only extrinsic curvature. A nematic field…
The topology and the geometry of a surface play a fundamental role in determining the equilibrium configurations of thin films of liquid crystals. We propose here a theoretical analysis of a recently introduced surface Frank energy, in the…
We discuss how the wettability and roughness of a solid impacts its hydrodynamic properties. We see in particular that hydrophobic slippage can be dramatically affected by the presence of roughness. Owing to the development of refined…
We investigate the emergence of orientational order among +1/2 disclinations in active nematic liquid crystals. Using a combination of theoretical and experimental methods, we show that +1/2 disclinations have short-range antiferromagnetic…
Nematic liquid crystals possess three different phases: isotropic, uniaxial, and biaxial. The ground state of most nematics is either isotropic or uniaxial, depending on the external temperature. Nevertheless, biaxial domains have been…
We discuss the behavior of a crystalline surface with a disordered substrate. We focus on the possible existence of a {\em super-rough} glassy phase, with height-height correlation functions which vary as the square logarithm of the…
The problem of measuring nontrivial static correlations in deeply supercooled liquids made recently some progress thanks to the introduction of amorphous boundary conditions, in which a set of free particles is subject to the effect of a…
Using the classical density functional theory of freezing and Monte Carlo computer simulations, we explore the liquid-crystalline phase behavior of hard rectangles on flat and cylindrical manifolds. Moreover, we study the effect of a static…
The ability to manipulate polar entities with multiple external fields opens exciting possibilities for emerging functionalities and novel applications in spin systems, photonics, metamaterials, and soft matter. Liquid crystals (LCs),…
In this paper, we investigate the effect of boundary surface roughness on numerical simulations of incompressible fluid flow past a cylinder in two and three spatial dimensions furnished with slip boundary conditions. The governing…
We explore the nematic ordering of the rod-like liquid crystals 5CB and 6CB, embedded into parallel-aligned nanochannels in mesoporous silicon and silica membranes as a function of mean channel radius (4.7<=R <=8.3 nm), and thus geometrical…
Pressure-imposed rheometry is used to examine the influence of surface roughness on the rheology of immersed and dry frictional spheres in the dense regime. The quasi-static value of the effective friction coefficient is not significantly…
Within the macroscopic Landau-de Gennes approach, we examine the Gaussian normal mode fluctuations of semi-infinite nematic liquid crystals in a regime of critical wetting. It is argued that surface free-energy potentials that strongly…
Thin liquid films on surfaces are part of our everyday life, they serve e.g. as coatings or lubricants. The stability of a thin layer is governed by interfacial forces, described by the effective interface potential, and has been subject of…
We consider a mathematical model that describes the flow of a Nematic Liquid Crystal (NLC) film placed on a flat substrate, across which a spatially-varying electric potential is applied. Due to their polar nature, NLC molecules interact…
Using event-driven molecular dynamics simulations, we quantify how the self diffusivity of confined hard-sphere fluids depends on the nature of the confining boundaries. We explore systems with featureless confining boundaries that treat…
Within the framework of Landau-de Gennes theory for nematic liquid crystals, we study the temperature-induced isotropic-nematic phase transition on a spherical shell. Below a critical temperature, a thin layer of nematic coating a…
Here we study theoretically the dynamics of a 2D and a 3D isotropic droplet in a nematic liquid crystal under a shear flow. We find a large repertoire of possible nonequilibrium steady states as a function of the shear rate and of the…