Related papers: Mean-Field Nematic--Smectic-{\sl A} Transition in …
Liquid crystalline networks (LCNs) are stimuli-responsive materials formed from polymeric chains cross-linked with rod-like mesogenic segments, which, in the nematic phase, align along a non-polar director. A key characteristic of these…
A range of monodomain nematic liquid crystal elastomers containing differing proportions of photo-isomerisable mesogenic moieties, which turn from a rod-like to a kinked shape upon ultraviolet (UV) irradiation, was studied. Depending on the…
High-resolution X-ray scattering studies of the nonpolar thermotropic liquid crystal 4-n-pentylphenylthiol-4'-n-octyloxybenzoate (\bar{8}S5) in aerosil gel nano-networks reveal that the aerosil-induced disorder significantly alters both the…
A Self Consistent Field Theory description of equilibrium, but non uniform, configurations adopted by semi flexible liquid crystal molecules is presented. Two cases are considered, isotropic-nematic phase boundaries, and topological defects…
Following the groundbreaking discovery of the ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal phase (NF), a series of closely-related new polar phases have also been found. An especially interesting one is the ferroelectric smectic A phase (SmAF) with…
Liquid crystalline phases of matter permeate nature and technology, with examples ranging from cell membranes to liquid-crystal displays. Remarkably, electronic liquid crystal phases can exist in two-dimensional electron systems (2DES) at…
We study smectic-liquid-crystal order in a cell with a heterogeneous substrate imposing surface random positional and orientational pinnings. Proposing a minimal random elastic model, we demonstrate that, for a thick cell, the smectic state…
When liquid-crystal elastomers are prepared without any alignment, disordered polydomain structures emerge as the materials are cooled into the nematic phase. These polydomain structures have been attributed to quenched disorder in the…
We theoretically study the nematic ordering transition of rods that are able to elastically adjust their mutually excluded volumes. The model rods, which consist of a hard core surrounded by a deformable shell, mimic the structure of…
The emergence of new techniques for the fabrication of nematic droplets with nontrivial topology provides new routes for the assembly of responsive devices. Here we perform a numerical study of spherical nematic droplets on fibres. We…
Motivated by recent experimental data on thin film superconductors and oxide interfaces we propose a random-resistor network apt to describe the occurrence of a metal-superconductor transition in a two-dimensional electron system with…
We develop a theory of Smectic A - Smectic C phase transition with anomalously weak smectic layer contraction. We construct a phenomenological description of this transition by generalizing the Chen-Lubensky model. Using a mean-field…
Experimentally it is possible to manipulate the director in a (chiral) smectic-$A$ elastomer using an electric field. This suggests that the director is not necessarily locked to the layer normal, as described in earlier papers that…
Electronic-liquid-crystal phases, in which part of the spatial symmetries are broken spontaneously, are considered to play a vital role in interpreting the structure-property relation in strongly-correlated materials. Although…
We study the layer-to-layer diffusion in smectic-A liquid crystals of colloidal hard rods with different length-to-diameter ratios using computer simulations. The layered arrangement of the smectic phase yields a hopping-type diffusion due…
The nanostructure of two novel sulfur containing dimer materials has been investigated experimentally by hard and by resonant tender X-ray scattering techniques. On cooling the dimers through the nematic to twist-bend nematic (N-NTB) phase…
Despite their considerable practical and biological applications, the link between molecular properties, assembly conditions and self-organized structure in confined polymer solutions remains elusive. Here, we explore the lyotropic nematic…
The possibility is investigated that competition between fluctuations at different symmetry-related ordering wave vectors may affect the quantum phase transition between a fermi liquid and a longitudinal spin density wave state, in…
We discuss theoretically, using density-functional theory, the phase stability of nematic and smectic ordering in a suspension of platelets of the same thickness but with a high polydispersity in diameter, and study the influence of…
The nematic ordering in semiflexible polymers with contour length $L$ exceeding their persistence length $\ell_p$ is described by a confinement of the polymers in a cylinder of radius $r_{eff}$ much larger than the radius $r_\rho$, expected…