Related papers: Stabilising the Blue Phases
We consider helical configurations of a cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) sandwiched between two substrates with homogeneous director orientation favored at both confining plates. We study the CLC twist wavenumber $q$ characterizing the…
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 conserved Swift-Hohenberg equation with cubic nonlinearity provides the simplest microscopic description of the thermodynamic transition from a fluid state to a crystalline state. The resulting phase field crystal model describes a…
In equilibrium liquid crystals, chirality leads to a variety of spectacular three-dimensional structures, but chiral and achiral phases with the same broken continuous symmetries have identical long-time, large-scale dynamics. In this…
Chirality, ubiquitous in complex biological systems, can be controlled and quantified in synthetic materials such as cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) systems. In this work, we study spherical shells of CLC under weak anchoring conditions.…
A general procedure to investigate the elastic response and calculate the elastic constants of stressed and unstressed materials through continuum field modeling, particularly the phase field crystal (PFC) models, is presented. It is found…
I describe new phases of a chiral liquid crystal with nematic and hexatic order. I find a conical phase, similar to that of a cholesteric in an applied magnetic field for Frank elastic constants $K_2>K_3$. I discuss the role of fluctuations…
We study the behaviour of cubic blue phases under shear flow via lattice Boltzmann simulations. We focus on the two experimentally observed phases, Blue Phase I (BPI) and Blue Phase II (BPII). The disclination network of Blue Phase II…
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…
Recent numerical simulations of hard helical particle systems unveiled the existence of a novel chiral nematic phase, termed screw-like, characterised by the helical organization of the particle C$_2$ symmetry axes round the nematic…
We study the behaviour of confined cubic blue phases under shear flow via lattice Boltzmann simulations. We focus on the two experimentally observed phases, blue phase I and blue phase II. The disinclination network of blue phase II…
Recent experiments report that the long looked for thermotropic biaxial nematic phase has been finally detected in some thermotropic liquid crystalline systems. Inspired by these experimental observations we concentrate on some elementary…
Blue phase liquid crystal (BPLC) has important applications in adaptive lenses and phase modulators due to its polarization-independent property. During our efforts for development of the new materials, we found a novel phenomenology of…
Within the framework of Lorentz model for description of viscoelastic medium the influence of deformational defect of the shear modulus is studied on melting of ultrathin lubricant film confined between the atomically flat solid surfaces.…
A physics-based analytical model describing the phase transition from crystalline to conformationally disordered (condis) crystalline phase is developed. In the model, the free energy is written as a function of temperature and the lattice…
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…
In the review we briefly analyze the state-of-art in the theory of flexoelectric phenomena and analyze how significantly the flexoelectric coupling can change the polar order parameter distribution in different ferroics and liquid crystals.…
The rotationally-covariant renormalization group equations of motion for the density wave amplitudes in the phase field crystal model are shown to follow from a dynamical equation driven by an effective free energy density that we derive.…
We propose an extension of Frank-Oseen's elastic energy for bulk nematic liquid crystals which is based on the hypothesis that the fundamental deformations allowed in nematic liquid crystals are splay, twist and bend. The extended elastic…
A systematic computational and scaling analysis of defect textures in polygonal arrangement of cylindrical particles embedded in a cholesteric (Ch) liquid crystal matrix is performed using the Landau de Gennes model for chiral self…