Related papers: Polydispersity and ordered phases in solutions of …
Motivated by the observation of highly unstable flowing states in suspensions of microtubules and kinesin, we analyze a model of mutually-propelled filaments suspended in a solvent. The system undergoes a mean-field isotropic-nematic…
Dynamical density functional theory (DDFT) is a powerful variational framework to study the nonequilibrium properties of colloids by only considering a time-dependent one-body number density. Despite the large number of recent successes,…
Optical birefringence measurements on a rod-like liquid crystal (8OCB), imbibed in silica channels (7 nm diameter), are presented and compared to the thermotropic bulk behavior. The orientational and positional order of the confined liquid…
The effect of short chain grafting on the liquid crystalline (LC) ordering of nano-crystals is investigated using molecular dynamics simulations of a coarse-grained grafted nano-rod model. Monodisperse nano-rods, with aspect ratios typical…
Partitioning of (bio)materials in polymeric mixtures is a key phenomenon both in cellular environments, as well as in industrial applications. In cells, several macromolecules are suspended within different biomolecular phases. On the other…
A system of hard rectangles of size $m\times mk$ on a square lattice undergoes three entropy driven phase transitions with increasing density for large enough aspect ratio $k$: first from a low density isotropic to an intermediate density…
A disordered solid, such as an athermal jammed packing of soft spheres, exists in a rugged potential-energy landscape in which there are a myriad of stable configurations that defy easy enumeration and characterization. Nevertheless, in…
We consider the hydrodynamic theory of an active fluid of self-propelled particles with nematic aligning interactions. This class of materials has polar symmetry at the microscopic level, but forms macrostates of nematic symmetry. We…
In epithelia, how do collective cell migration and tissue spatial organization feedback on each other? We address this question through large-scale numerical simulations of the cellular Potts model. By accounting for both cell morphology…
We present theory and simulation of simultaneous chemical demixing and phase ordering in a polymer-liquid crystal mixture in conditions where isotropic- isotropic phase separation is metastable with respect to isotropic-nematic phase…
The field of active nematics has traditionally employed descriptions based on dipolar activity, with interactions that align along a single axis. However, it has been theoretically predicted that interactions with a substrate, prevalent in…
The yet virtually unexplored class of soft colloidal rods with small aspect ratio is investigated and shown to exhibit a very rich phase and dynamic behavior, spanning from liquid to nearly melt state. Instead of nematic order, these short…
A mesoscopic model of a diblock copolymer is used to study the stability of a lamellar structure under a uniform shear flow. We first obtain the nonlinear lamellar solutions under both steady and oscillatory shear flows. Regions of…
Solutions of semiflexible polymers confined by repulsive planar walls are studied by density functional theory and Molecular Dynamics simulations, to clarify the competition between the chain alignment favored by the wall and the depletion…
Brownian diffusion of rod-like polymers in the presence of randomly distributed spherical obstacles is studied using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. It is observed that dependence of the reduced diffusion coefficient of these…
We investigate the connection between the transport properties and the thermodynamics of electronic systems with a tendency to form broken-symmetry mesophases evocative of the physics of liquid crystals. Through a hydrodynamic approach to…
We study the polydisperse Baxter model of sticky hard spheres (SHS) in the modified Mean Spherical Approximation (mMSA). This closure is known to be the zero-order approximation (C0) of the Percus-Yevick (PY) closure in a density expansion.…
We consider a two-dimensional lattice model for liquid crystals consisting of long rods interacting via purely hard core interactions, with two allowed orientations defined by the underlying lattice. We rigorously prove the existence of a…
The optical birefringence of rod-like nematogens (7CB, 8CB), imbibed in parallel silica channels with 10 nm diameter and 300 micrometer length, is measured and compared to the thermotropic bulk behavior. The orientational order of the…
Smectic materials represent a unique state between fluids and solids, characterized by orientational and partial positional order, making them notoriously difficult to model, particularly in confining geometries. We propose a complex order…