Related papers: Smectic Liquid Crystals in Random Environments
Novel "smectic-P" behavior, in which self-propelled particles form rows and move on average along them, occurs generically within the orientationally-ordered phase of simple models that we simulate. Both apolar (head-tail symmetric) and…
Attractive emulsions near the colloidal glass transition are investigated by rheometry and optical microscopy under shear. We find that (a) the apparent viscosity \eta drops with increasing shear rate, then remains approximately constant in…
When glassy materials are rapidly quenched from the liquid to the solid state upon flow cessation or cooling, they solidify in an out-of-equilibrium configuration, retaining the memory of the processing conditions for very long times. This…
Recent computational and laboratory experiments have shown that the brittle-ductile transitions in metallic glasses such as Vitreloy1 are strongly sensitive to the initial effective disorder (or "fictive") temperature. Glasses with lower…
Using molecular dynamics simulations, with a realistic many-body embedded-atom potential, and a novel method to characterize local order, we study the structure of pure nickel during the rapid quench of the liquid and in the resulting…
In this paper, we review the recent activity of our group on the study of disorder effects on systems displaying phase coherence. These studies have focused on both the electronic transport through mesoscopic metallic spin glasses, and cold…
In quenched disordered systems, the existence of ordering is generally believed to be only possible in the weak disorder regime (disregarding models of spin-glass type). In particular, sufficiently large random fields is expected to…
Wigner crystals are extremely fragile, which is shown to result from very strong geometric frustration germane to long-range Coulomb interactions. Physically, this is manifested by a very small characteristic energy scale for shear density…
We consider the influence of quenched spatial disorder on phase transitions in classical and quantum systems. We show that rare strong disorder fluctuations can have dramatic effects on critical points. In classical systems with…
The phase behavior of the system of parallel rigid triblock copolymers is examined using the second-virial density functional theory. The triblock particle consists of two identical infinitely thin hard rods of finite lengths on the…
An unresolved issue in the theory of liquid crystals is the molecular basis of the electroclinic effect in the smectic-A phase. Recent x-ray scattering experiments suggest that, in a class of siloxane-containing liquid crystals, an electric…
In twist-bend nematic (N\textsubscript{TB}) liquid crystals (LCs), the mean molecular orientation exhibits heliconical structure with nanoscale periodicity. On the mesoscopic scale, N\textsubscript{TB} resembles layered systems (like…
All liquids (except helium due to quantum effects) crystallize at low temperatures, forming ordered structures. The competition between disorder, which stabilizes the liquid phase, and energy, which favors the ordered crystalline structure,…
The smectic C (smC) phase represents a unique class of liquid crystal phases characterised by the layered arrangement of molecules with tilted orientations with respect to layer normals. Building upon the real-valued tensorial smectic A…
The origin of the dramatic slowdown of dynamics near the glass transition temperature (Tg) remains a long-standing fundamental and unresolved issue in soft condensed matter. While single-molecule (SM) experiments using fluorescent probes…
The mechanical response of solids depends on temperature because the way atoms and molecules respond collectively to deformation is affected at various levels by thermal motion. This is a fundamental problem of solid state science and plays…
We consider the effect of droplet excitations in the random first order transition theory of glasses on the configurational entropy. The contribution of these excitations is estimated both at and above the ideal glass transition…
A series of YBa_{2-x}Sr_xCu_4O_8 single crystals was measured to study the influence of site disorder on the transition line Hss(T) between quasi-ordered vortex lattice and highly disordered vortex glass, as well as on the maximum critical…
Large-scale simulations on three-dimensional (3D) frustrated anisotropic XY model have been performed to study the nonequilibrium phase transitions of vortex matter in weak random pinning potential in layered superconductors. The…
We show that a simple two dimensional model of spin crossover materials gives rise to spin-state smectic phases where the pattern of high-spin (HS) and low-spin (LS) metal centers spontaneously breaks rotational symmetry and translational…