Related papers: Polar Smectic Films
Experimental and theoretical studies of a smectic-hexatic transition in freely suspended films of 54COOBC compound are presented. X-ray investigations revealed a discontinuous first-order transition into the hexatic phase. Moreover, the…
Topological textures like vortices, labyrinths and skyrmions formed in ferroic materials have attracted extensive interests during the past decade for their fundamental physics, intriguing topology, and technological prospects. So far,…
In liquid crystals, if flexoelectric couplings between polar order and director gradients are strong enough, the uniform nematic phase can become unstable to formation of a modulated polar phase. Previous theories have predicted two types…
Confinement breaks the translational symmetry of materials. Such symmetry breaking can be used to obtain configurations that are not otherwise accessible in the bulk. Here, we explore the effect of substrate-liquid interactions on the…
Liquid crystalline polymers are materials of considerable scientific interest and technological value to society [1-3]. An important subset of such materials exhibit rubber-like elasticity; these can combine the remarkable optical…
Controlling grain orientations within polycrystalline all-inorganic halide perovskite solar cells can help increase conversion efficiencies toward their thermodynamic limits, however the forces governing texture formation are ambiguous.…
We present an x-ray study of freely suspended hexatic films of the liquid crystal 3(10)OBC. Our results reveal spatial inhomogeneities of the bond-orientational (BO) order in the vicinity of the hexatic-smectic phase transition and the…
We consider a confined sheared active polar liquid crystal with a uniform orientation and study the effect of variations in the magnitude of polarization. Restricting our analysis to one-dimensional geometries, we demonstrate that with…
Numerical Simulations are employed to create amorphous nano-films of a chosen thickness on a crystalline substrate which induces strain on the film. The films are grown by a vapor deposition technique which was recently developed to create…
A new method is presented for mesoscopic simulations of particle dispersions in liquid crystal solvents. It allows efficient first-principle simulations of the dispersions involving many particles with many-body interactions mediated by the…
We explore the smectic liquid crystal order in a cell with a "dirty" substrate imposing random pinnings. Within harmonic elasticity we find a subtle three-dimensional surface disorder-driven transition into a pinned smectic-glass,…
Polar nematic liquid crystals have two special features, compared with conventional nematic liquid crystals. First, because of flexoelectricity, the combination of polar order and splay reduces the free energy. Second, because of…
Particles at liquid interfaces have the tendency to cluster due to capillary forces competing with gravitational buoyancy (i.e., normal to the distorted free surface). This is known as the Cheerios effect. Here we experimentally and…
We investigate the phase behaviour of a two-dimensional colloidal model system of ultra-soft particles on a substrate which varies periodically along one spatial direction. Our calculations are based on mean-field density functional theory…
Using numerical simulations we examine the static and dynamic properties of the recently proposed vortex liquid crystal state. We confirm the existence of a smectic-A phase in the absence of pinning. Quenched disorder can induce a smectic…
Electroconvection in a thin, sheared fluid film displays a rich sequence of bifurcations between different flow states as the driving voltage is increased. We present a numerical study of an annular film in which a radial potential…
A generic theory about skyrmion crystal (SkX) formation in chiral magnetic thin films and its fascinating thermodynamic behaviours is presented. A chiral magnetic film can have many metastable states with an arbitrary skyrmion density up to…
The peculiarities of thermal expansion of $bcc$ and $fcc$ zirconium films with (100) and (110) crystallographic orientations are studied at a constant zero pressure by the molecular dynamics (MD) method with a many-body interatomic…
Smectic order has been generated in superconducting Nb films with two-fold symmetry arrays of symmetric pinning centers. Magnetic fields applied perpendicularly to the films develop a vortex matter smectic phase that is easily detected when…
A flux liquid can condense into a smectic crystal in a pure layered superconductors with the magnetic field oriented nearly parallel to the layers. If the smectic order is commensurate with the layering, this crystal is {\sl stable} to…