Related papers: Topological Defects and Interactions in Nematic Em…

Microbullet particles, cylinders with one blunt and one spherical end, offer a novel platform to study the effects of anisotropy and curvature on colloidal assembly in complex fluids. Here, we disperse microbullets in…

We characterise the particlelike kinematics of charge-carrying topological defects in nematic media via a geometric field theory. This differs from the theory of electromagnetism, with which it is often compared, due to the absence of…

We investigate the interfacial dynamics involved in the impact of a droplet on a liquid-liquid system, which involves the impingement of an immiscible core liquid drop from a vertical separation onto an interfacial shell liquid layer…

Topological defects are singularities in material fields that play a vital role across a range of systems: from cosmic microwave background polarization to superconductors, and biological materials. Although topological defects and their…

To model a nematic emulsion consisting of a surfactant-coated water droplet dispersed in a nematic host, we performed a molecular dynamics simulation of a droplet immersed in a system of 2048 Gay-Berne ellipsoids in a nematic phase. Strong…

We numerically investigate the morphology and disclination line dynamics of active nematic droplets in three dimensions. Although our model only incorporates the simplest possible form of achiral active stress, active nematic droplets…

Liquid crystals formed of bent-core molecules are exotic materials that exhibit the twist-bend nematic phase. This arises when an energetic preference for nonzero local bend distortion is accommodated via twist in the texture, resulting in…

In this paper we consider the effects of the interaction between droplets or other deformable objects in an emulsion under random stirring of the host fluid. Our main interest is to obtain autocorrelation functions of the shape fluctuations…

Topological defects play a prominent role in the physics of two-dimensional materials. When driven out of equilibrium in active nematics, disclinations can acquire spontaneous self-propulsion and drive self-sustained flows upon…

Living materials at different length scales manifest active nematic features such as orientational order, nematic topological defects, and active nematic turbulence. Using numerical simulations we investigate the impact of fluid inertia on…

There is now growing evidence of the emergence and biological functionality of liquid crystal features, including nematic order and topological defects, in cellular tissues. However, how such features that intrinsically rely on particle…

Aqueous dispersions of exfoliated, bile-salt stabilized single-wall carbon nanotubes exhibit a first order transition to a nematic liquid-crystalline phase. The nematic phase presents itself in the form of micron-sized nematic droplets also…

A nematic liquid crystal confined to the surface of a sphere exhibits topological defects of total charge $+2$ due to the topological constraint. In equilibrium, the nematic field forms four $+1/2$ defects, located at the corners of a…

Topological defects play a central role in the formation and organization of various biological systems. Historically, such nonequilibrium defects have been mainly studied in the context of homogeneous active nematics. Phase-separated…

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…

In this paper we numerically investigate the breakup dynamics of droplets in an emulsion flowing in a tapered microchannel with a narrow constriction. The mesoscale approach for multicomponent fluids with near contact interactions is shown…

Field theories predict that phase transitions sequentially breaking continuous and discrete symmetries can generate hybrid topological structures in which defects of different dimensionalities merge. We report experimental and numerical…

The transition from a nematic to an isotropic state in a self-closing spherical liquid crystal shell with tangential alignment is a stimulating phenomenon to investigate, as the topology dictates that the shell exhibits local isotropic…

We present a study of a water-in-oil microemulsion in which surfactant coated water nanodroplets are dispersed in the isotropic phase of the thermotropic liquid crystal 5CB. As the temperature is lowered below the isotropic to nematic phase…

We explore a novel strategy of patterning nematic elastomers that does not require inscribing the texture directly. It is based on varying the dopant concentration that, beside shifting the phase transition point, affects the nematic…