Related papers: Untwisting of a Strained Cholesteric Elastomer by …
The thermodynamical stability of a set of circular double helical molecules is analyzed by path integral techniques. The minicircles differ only in \textit{i)} the radius and \textit{ii)} the number of base pairs ($N$) arranged along the…
We study the problem of a cholesteric liquid crystal confined to an elliptical channel. The system is geometrically frustrated because the cholesteric prefers to adopt a uniform rate of twist deformation, but the elliptical domain precludes…
Predicting the macroscopic mechanical behavior of polymeric materials from the micro-structural features has remained a challenge for decades. Existing theoretical models often fail to accurately capture the experimental data, due to…
Molecular chirality, and the chiral symmetry breaking of resulting macroscopic phases, can be topologically imprinted and manipulated by crosslinking and swelling of polymer networks. We present a new experimental approach to…
The relaxation dynamics of a polymer wound around a fixed obstacle constitutes a fundamental instance of polymer with twist and torque and it is of relevance also for DNA denaturation dynamics. We investigate it by simulations and Langevin…
We study numerically the minimum energy path and energy barriers for dislocation nucleation in a two-dimensional atomistic model of strained epitaxial layers on a substrate with lattice misfit. Stress relaxation processes from coherent to…
We construct phase diagrams for charged rodlike colloids within the second-virial approximation as a function of rod concentration, salt concentration, and colloidal charge. Besides the expected isotropic-nematic transition, we also find…
When stretched uniaxially, a thin elastic sheet may exhibit buckling. The occurrence of buckling depends on the geometrical properties of the sheet and the magnitude of the applied strain. Here we show that an elastomeric sheet initially…
In bulk ferroelectric liquid crystals, the molecular director twists in a helix. In narrow cells, this helix can be unwound by an applied electric field or by boundary effects. To describe helix unwinding as a function of both electric…
Stiff, elongated biomolecules such as filamentous viruses, DNA or cellulose nanocrystals are known to form liquid crystals often exhibiting a helical supramolecular organization. Little is known about the microscopic origin, size and…
A dielectric elastomer whose edges are held fixed will buckle, given sufficient applied voltage, resulting in a nontrivial out-of-plane deformation. We study this situation numerically using a nonlinear elastic model which decouples two of…
We start from a variational model for nematic elastomers that involves two energies: mechanical and nematic. The first one consists of a nonlinear elastic energy which is influenced by the orientation of the molecules of the nematic…
A novel analysis of homogeneous nucleation of dislocations in sheared two-dimensional crystals described by periodized discrete elasticity models is presented. When the crystal is sheared beyond a critical strain $F=F_{c}$, the strained…
A system of $n$ screw dislocations in an isotropic crystal undergoing antiplane shear is studied in the framework of linear elasticity. Imposing a suitable boundary condition for the strain, namely requesting the non-vanishing of its…
We explore the non-equilibrium dissipative dynamics of a system of identical charged particles trapped on a closed helix. The particles are subject to an external force accelerating them along the underlying structure. The effective…
The symmetries of the DNA double helix require a new term in its linear response to stress: the coupling between twist and stretch. Recent experiments with torsionally-constrained single molecules give the first direct measurement of this…
In a nematic gel, the appearance of nematic order is accompanied by a spontaneous elongation of the gel parallel to the nematic director. If such a gel is made chiral, it has a tendency to form a cholesteric helical texture, in which local…
Force-induced reversible transformations between coiled and normal polymorphs of bacterial flagella have been observed in recent optical-tweezer experiment. We introduce a discrete elastic rod model with two competing helical states…
It is shown that curved and flat helical double twisted liquid crystal (DTLC) in blue phase, can be unstable (stable) depending of the sign, negative (positive) of sectional curvature, depending on the pitch of the helix of the nematic…
By means of extensive replica-exchange simulations of generic coarse-grained models for helical polymers, we systematically investigate the structural transitions into all possible helical phases for flexible and semiflexible elastic…