Related papers: Fluctuating Membranes with Tilt Order
The recent discovery of nematic liquid crystals with polar order (ferroelectric nematic) has created immense interest. Despite intensive research, several physical properties of this liquid crystal are yet to be investigated and understood.…
We analyze a model of itinerant electrons interacting through a quadrupole density-density repulsion in three dimensions. At the mean field level, the interaction drives a continuous Pomeranchuk instability towards $d$-wave, spin-triplet…
We predict the conditions under which two oppositely charged membranes show a dynamic, attractive instability. Two layers with unequal charges of opposite sign can repel or be stable when in close proximity. However, dynamic charge density…
Membrane organization is essential for cellular functions such as signal transduction and membrane trafficking. A major challenge is to understand the lateral heterogeneous structures in membranes and membrane fluidity in the presence of…
We investigated the properties of bilayer fluctuations using molecular dynamics. We modeled the amphipathic molecules as a diatomic molecule, constructed a bilayer in the solvent, and observed the Fourier spectrum of its fluctuations. The…
Near a critical point, the time scale of thermally-induced fluctuations diverges in a manner determined by the dynamic universality class. Experiments have verified predicted 3D dynamic critical exponents in many systems, but similar…
Very thin elastic sheets, even at zero temperature, exhibit nonlinear elastic response by virtue of their dominant bending modes. Their behavior is even richer at finite temperature. Here we use molecular dynamics (MD) to study the…
We study the fluctuation spectrum of fluid membranes carrying grafted polymers. Contrary to usual descriptions, we find that the modifications induced by the polymers cannot be reduced to the renormalization of the membrane bending…
Fluctuations exist in any material object $A$. If $A$ has non-zero temperature $T$, one speaks about thermal fluctuations. If $A$ is at very low $T$, the fluctuations are of quantum origin. Interesting effects appear if two bodies $A$ and…
Two dimensional crystals melt via an intermediate \textit{hexatic} phase which is characterized by an anomalous scaling of spatial and orientational correlation functions and the absence of an attraction between dislocations. We propose a…
An analysis of the IR absorbance for the segmented functional groups of liquid crystal dimers: mesogen and linker, enabled the orientation order to be determined and information about the dipole interactions in the nematic and twist-bend…
Microphase separation of membrane components is thought to play an important role in many physiological processes, from cell signaling to endocytosis and cellular trafficking. Here, we study how variations in the membrane composition can be…
We consider membranes as fluid deformable surface and allow for higher order geometric terms in the bending energy. The evolution equations are derived and numerically solved using surface finite elements. The higher order geometric terms…
We report beta-NMR investigations of polarized 8Li implanted in thin Pb and Ag/Nb films. At the critical superconducting temperature, we observe a singular peak in the spin relaxation rate in small longitudinal magnetic fields, which is…
Long-scale dynamic fluctuation phenomena in freely suspended films is analyzed. We consider isotropic films that, say, can be pulled from bulk smectic A liquid crystals. The key feature of such objects is possibility of bending deformations…
How condensed-matter simulations depend on the number of molecules being simulated ($N$) is sometimes itself a valuable piece of information. Liquid crystals provide a case in point. Light scattering and $2d$-IR experiments on…
The equilibrium and fluctuation methods for determining the surface tension, $\sigma$, and bending modulus, $\kappa$, of a bilayer membrane with a fixed projected area are discussed. In the fluctuation method the elastic coefficients…
Stability is an important and fruitful avenue of research for liquid crystal elastomers. At constant temperature, upon stretching, the homogeneous state of a nematic body becomes unstable, and alternating shear stripes develop at very low…
Biological membranes mainly consist of lipids and proteins. While the proteins have many functions as single molecules, the membrane as a whole displays physical properties that cannot be explained on the single molecule level. For example,…
The bending rigidity $k_c$ of bilayer vesicles self-assembled from amphiphilic diblock copolymers has been measured using single and dual-micropipet techniques. These copolymers are nearly a factor of 5 greater in hydrophobic membrane…