Related papers: Boundary-roughness effects in nematic liquid cryst…
Small non-spherical particles settling in a quiescent fluid tend to orient so that their broad side faces down, because this is a stable fixed point of their angular dynamics at small particle Reynolds number. Turbulence randomises the…
Nematic interfaces are thin fluid films, ideally two-dimensional, endowed with an in-plane degenerate nematic order. In this letter we examine a generalisation of the classical Plateau problem to an axisymmetric nematic interface bounded by…
In this paper we focus on crystal surfaces led out of equilibrium by a growth or erosion process. As a consequence of that the surface may undergo morphological instabilities and develop a distinct structure: ondulations, mounds or…
We show by means of continuum theory and simulations that geometric percolation in uniaxial nematics of hard slender particles is fundamentally different from that in isotropic dispersions. In the nematic, percolation depends only very…
We introduce a new experimental approach to study the structural transitions of large numbers of nanoparticle-coated droplets as their volume is reduced. We use an emulsion system where the dispersed phase is slightly soluble in the…
The fluctuation spectrum of membranes in nematic solvents is altered by the boundary condition imposed on the bulk nematic director by the curved membrane. We discuss some properties of single and multi-membrane systems in nematic solvents,…
An individual defect in a nematic liquid crystal moves not only in response to its interaction with other defects but also in response to an external field. We analyze the motion of a wedge disclination in the presence of an applied field…
Disclinations lines play a key role in many physical processes, from the fracture of materials to the formation of the early universe. Achieving versatile control over disclinations is key to developing novel electro-optical devices,…
We investigate theoretically the wetting properties of cholesteric liquid crystals at a planar substrate. If the properties of substrate and of the interface are such that the cholesteric layers are not distorted the wetting properties are…
Nematic elastomers are rubbery solids which have liquid crystals incorporated into their polymer chains. These materials display many unusual mechanical properties, one such being the ability to form fine-scale microstructure. In this work,…
The critical behavior at the transition from uniform nematic to twist-bend modulated nematic phase is revealed and shown to be well explained by the mean field approximation. The study was performed on a group of materials that exhibit an…
In this paper we discuss the behavior of the Oseen-Frank model for nematic liquid crystals in the limit of vanishing thickness. More precisely, in a thin slab~$\Omega\times (0,h)$ with~$\Omega\subset \mathbb{R}^2$ and $h>0$ we consider the…
We study the mechanical buckling of a two dimensional membrane coated with a thin layer of superfluid. It is seen that a singularity (vortex or anti-vortex defect) in the phase of the quantum order parameter, distorts the membrane metric…
We investigate the structure of nematic liquid crystal thin films described by the Landau--de Gennes tensor-valued order parameter with Dirichlet boundary conditions of nonzero degree. We prove that as the elasticity constant goes to zero a…
Active liquid crystals or active gels are soft materials which can be physically realised e.g. by preparing a solution of cytoskeletal filaments interacting with molecular motors. We study the hydrodynamics of an active liquid crystal in a…
Motivated by recent experiments on biomimetic membranes exposed to several aqueous phases, we theoretically study the morphology of a membrane in contact with a liquid droplet formed via aqueous phase separation. We concentrate on membranes…
We study the effect of random porous matrices on the ordering in nematic liquid crystals. The randomness destroys orientational lang-range order and drives the liquid crystal into a glass state. We predict two glass phases one of which…
Partially wetting nematic liquid crystal (NLC) films on substrates are unstable to dewetting-type instabilities due to destablizing solid/NLC interaction forces. These instabilities are modified by the nematic nature of the films, which…
Chiral twisting of the molecular orientation within the layer of a smectic-A liquid crystal has been investigated using circular dichroism spectroscopy. The results indicate that a rotation of the layers away from the alignment direction is…
Numerical simulations of crystal defects are necessarily restricted to finite computational domains, supplying artificial boundary conditions that emulate the effect of embedding the defect in an effectively infinite crystalline…