Related papers: Can liquid metal surfaces have hexatic order?
A theory for the non-local stress in liquids captures the crossover from viscous to elastic correlations upon supercooling. It explains the emergence of long-ranged stress fields in glass which originate from the coupling of shear stress to…
A hexagonal columnar crystal undergoes a shear-melting transition above a critical shear rate or stress. We combine the analysis of the shear-thinning regime below the melting with that of synchrotron X-ray scattering data under shear and…
We develop a theory for a novel state of ${}^4$He films, that possesses off diagonal order (as in the superfluid state), as well as hexatic or bond orientational order. Within our description, both the hexatic and superfluid transitions are…
Quasi-long ranged order is the hallmark of two-dimensional liquid crystals. At equilibrium, this property implies that the correlation function of the local orientational order parameter decays with distance as a power law: i.e.…
The ability to manipulate polar entities with multiple external fields opens exciting possibilities for emerging functionalities and novel applications in spin systems, photonics, metamaterials, and soft matter. Liquid crystals (LCs),…
Electronic nematicity plays important role in iron-based superconductors. These materials have layered structure and theoretical description of their magnetic and nematic transitions has been well established in two-dimensional…
The layered sodium cobalt oxide NaxCoO2 is studied by electron diffraction for a wide range of sodium contents, 0.15<x<0.75. An extensive series of ordered Na ion-Na vacancy superlattices is found beyond the simple hexagonal average…
The melting transition of two-dimensional (2D) systems is a fundamental problem in condensed matter and statistical physics that has advanced significantly through the application of computational resources and algorithms. 2D systems…
We present a Monte Carlo simulation study of the phase behavior of two-dimensional classical particles repelling each other through an isotropic Gaussian potential. As in the analogous three-dimensional case, a reentrant-melting transition…
Hard spherocylinders (cylinders of length $L$ and diameter $D$ capped at both ends with two hemispheres) provide a suitable model for investigating entropy-driven, mesophase formations in real colloidal fluids that are composed of rigid…
The problem of the orientational ordering transition for lattice-gas models of liquid crystals is discussed in the low-dimensional case $d=1,2$. For isotropic short-range interactions, orientational long-range order at finite temperature is…
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 transition of a fluid to a rigid glass upon cooling is a common route of transformation from liquid to solid that embodies the most poorly understood features of both phases1,2,3. From the liquid perspective, the puzzle is to understand…
A theory is constructed for dense ionic solutions near charged planar walls that is valid for strong inter-ionic correlations. This theory predicts a fluctuation-induced, first-order transition and spontaneous charge density ordering at the…
Nanocrystal gelation provides a powerful framework to translate nanoscale properties into bulk materials and to engineer emergent properties through the assembled microstructure. However, many established gelation strategies rely on…
We report on X-ray studies of freely suspended hexatic films of three different liquid crystal compounds. By applying angular X-ray cross-correlation analysis (XCCA) to the measured diffraction patterns the parameters of the…
This paper presents a broad theoretical and simulation study of the high temperature behavior of crystalline alkali halide surfaces typified by NaCl(100), of the liquid NaCl surface near freezing, and of the very unusual partial wetting of…
Optical polarimetry measurements of the orientational order of a discotic liquid crystal based on a pyrene derivative and confined in parallel-aligned nanochannels of monolithic mesoporous alumina, silica, and silicon as a function of…
We study the influence of quenched disorder on the two-dimensional melting behavior by using both video-microscopy of superparamagnetic colloidal particles and computer simulations of repulsive parallel dipoles. Quenched disorder is…
In uniaxial soft matter with a reorientational nonlinearity, such as nematic liquid crystals, a light beam in the extraordinary polarization walks off its wavevector due to birefringence, while it undergoes self-focusing via an increase in…