Related papers: Orientational Ordering in Sequence-Disordered Liqu…
When liquid-crystalline elastomers pass through the isotropic-nematic transition, the orientational order parameter and the elastic strain vary rapidly but smoothly, without the expected first-order discontinuity. This broadening of the…
Theory and simulations of simultaneous chemical demixing and phase ordering are performed for a mixed order parameter system with an isotropic-isotropic (I-I) phase separation that is metastable with respect to an isotropic-nematic (I-N)…
Experimental and modeling/simulation studies of phase equilibrium and growth morphologies of novel polymer-dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) mixtures of PS (polystyrene) and liquid crystals that exhibit a direct isotropic/smectic-A (lamellar)…
Recent experiments have found a bent-core liquid crystal in which the layer chirality alternates from layer to layer, giving a racemic or "antichiral" material, even though the molecules are uniformly chiral. To explain this effect, we map…
We model a melt of monodisperse side-chain liquid crystalline polymers as a melt of comb copolymers in which the side groups are rod-coil diblock copolymers. We consider both excluded volume and Maier-Saupe interactions. The first acts…
To enlighten the nature of the order-disorder and order-order transitions in block copolymer melts confined in narrow capillaries we analyze peculiarities of the conventional Landau weak crystallization theory of systems confined to…
A possible mechanism of electronic phase separation in the systems with orbital ordering is analyzed. We suggest a simple model taking into account an interplay between the delocalization of charge carriers introduced by doping and the…
Colloidal particles dispersed in a partially ordered medium, such as a liquid crystal (LC) phase, disturb its alignment and are subject to elastic forces. These forces are long-ranged, anisotropic and tunable through temperature or external…
In recent years, higher-order topological phases have attracted great interest in various fields of physics. These phases have protected boundary states at lower-dimensional boundaries than the conventional first-order topological phases…
The cubic blue phases of liquid crystals are fascinating and technologically promising examples of hierarchically structured soft materials, comprising ordered networks of defect lines (disclinations) within a liquid crystalline matrix. We…
Using ultrashort laser pulses, it has become possible to probe the dynamics of long-range order in solids on microscopic timescales. In the conventional description of symmetry-broken phases within time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau theory, the…
Motivated by experiments on sheared suspensions that show a transition between ordered and disordered phases, we here study the long-time behavior of a sheared and overdamped 2-d system of particles interacting by repulsive forces. As a…
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…
Studies of nucleation generally focus on the properties of the critical cluster, but the presence of defects within the crystal lattice means that the population of nuclei necessarily evolve through a distribution of pre-critical clusters…
We investigate the morphology of diblock copolymers in the vicinity of flat, chemically patterned surfaces. Using a Ginzburg-Landau free energy, spatial variations of the order parameter are given in terms of a general two-dimensional…
Ferroelectric ordering in liquids is a fundamental question of physics. Here, we show that ferroelectric ordering of the molecules causes formation of recently reported splay nematic liquid-crystalline phase. As shown by dielectric…
Nematic liquid crystals exhibit configurations in which the underlying ordering changes markedly on macroscopic length scales. Such structures include topological defects in the nematic phase and tactoids within nematic-isotropic…
The liquid, plastic crystalline and ordered crystalline phases of CBr$_4$ were studied using neutron powder diffraction. The measured total scattering differential cross-sections were modelled by Reverse Monte Carlo simulation techniques…
Phase transitions in disordered systems can be smeared if rare spatial regions develop true static order while the bulk system is in the disordered phase. Here, we study the effects of spatial disorder correlations on such smeared phase…
The dynamic orientational order-disorder transition of clusters consisting of octahedral molecules is formulated in terms of symmetry-adapted rotator functions. The transition from a higher-temperature body-centered-cubic, orientationally…