Related papers: Soft elasticity in biaxial smectic and smectic-C e…
Cavitation and sulcification of soft elastomers are two examples of thresholdless, nonlinear instabilities that evade detection by linearization. I show that the onset of such instabilities can be understood as a kind of phase coexistence…
Spontaneous onset of a low temperature topologically ordered phase in a 2-dimensional (2D) lattice model of uniaxial liquid crystal (LC) was debated extensively pointing to a suspected underlying mechanism affecting the RG flow near the…
Liquid crystals can self-organize into a layered smectic phase. While the smectic layers are typically straight forming a lamellar pattern in bulk, external confinement may drastically distort the layers due to the boundary conditions…
The influence of cyclic loading and glass stability on structural relaxation and yielding transition in amorphous alloys was investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. We considered a binary mixture cooled deep into the glass phase…
There is a recent interest in studying odd elasticity in soft solids. Current focus has been on simple solids. However, many soft solids are structured and can exhibit nematic elasticity or viscoelasticity. Here we generalize the concept of…
We study theoretically the smectic A to C phase transition in isotropic disordered environments. Surprisingly, we find that, as in the clean smectic A to C phase transition, smectic layer fluctuations do not affect the nature of the…
Smectic liquid crystals vividly illustrate the subtle interplay of broken translational and orientational symmetries, by exhibiting defect structures forming geometrically perfect confocal ellipses and hyperbolas. Here, we develop and…
Wrinkles commonly develop in a thin film deposited on a soft elastomer substrate when the film is subject to compression. Motivated by recent experiments [Agrawal et al., Soft Matter 8, 7138 (2012)] that show how wrinkle morphology can be…
We describe a 2D spring-block model for the transition from static to kinetic friction at an elastic slider/rigid substrate interface obeying a minimalistic friction law (Amontons-Coulomb). By using realistic boundary conditions, a number…
We present a self-consistent field theory (SCFT) of semiflexible (wormlike) diblock copolymers, each consisting of a rigid and a flexible part. The segments of the polymers are otherwise identical, in particular with regard to their…
Soft actuators allow to transform external stimuli to mechanical deformations. Because of their deformational response to external magnetic fields, magnetic gels and elastomers represent ideal candidates for such tasks. Mostly, linear…
Using bosonization, we study a microscopic model of parallel quantum wires constructed from two dimensional Dirac fermions in the presence of periodic topological domain walls. The model accounts for the lateral spread of the wavefunctions…
A spherocylinder-like molecule with a Lennard-Jones type interaction is proposed as a model of smectic-A (Sm-A) liquid crystals, which can form a free-standing film. By means of Gibbs ensemble simulations, the isotropic, nematic, and Sm-A…
The equilibrium amorphous solid state -- formed, e.g., by adequately randomly crosslinking the constituents of a macromolecular fluid -- is a heterogeneous state characterized by a universal distribution of particle localization lengths.…
In the classic theory of solid adhesion, surface energy drives deformation to increase contact area while bulk elasticity opposes it. Recently, solid surface stress has been shown also to play an important role in opposing deformation of…
Recently, a new class of smectic liquid crystal phases (SmCP phases) characterized by the spontaneous formation of macroscopic chiral domains from achiral bent-core molecules has been discovered. We have carried out Monte Carlo simulations…
We investigate thermal fluctuations in a smectic A phase of an amphiphile-solvent mixture with molecular dynamics simulations. We use an idealized model system, where solvent particles are represented by simple beads, and amphiphiles by…
Cholesteric liquid crystals exhibit great morphological richness of static metastable states. Understanding the transitions between such states is key for the development of switchable devices. We show, using a quasi-one-dimensional model,…
Amongst the various fascinating types of material behavior featured by magnetic gels and elastomers are magnetostrictive effects. That is, deformations in shape or changes in volume are induced from outside by external magnetic fields.…
Smectic liquid crystals are materials formed by stacking deformable, fluid layers. Though smectics prefer to have flat, uniformly-spaced layers, boundary conditions can impose curvature on the layers. Since the layer spacing and curvature…