Related papers: Measuring Cosmic Defect Correlations in Liquid Cry…
We study the temperature dependence of static and dynamic responses of Coulomb interacting particles in two-dimensional traps across the thermal crossover from an amorphous solid- to liquid-like behaviors. While static correlations, that…
In culture migrating and interacting amoeboid cells can form nematic liquid crystal phases. A polar nematic liquid crystal is formed if the interaction has a polar symmetry. One type of white blood cells (granulocytes) form clusters where…
We consider a two-dimensional Coulomb gas of positive and negative pointlike unit charges interacting via a logarithmic potential. The density (rather than the charge) correlation functions are studied. In the bulk, the form-factor theory…
The paper is concerned with various issues surrounding the mathematical description of defects in models of liquid crystals, drawing on experience from solid mechanics. The roles played by a suitable choice of function space and by the…
Certain systems, such as amphiphile solutions or diblock copolymer melts, may assemble into structures called ``mesophases'', with properties intermediate between those of a solid and a liquid. These mesophases can be of very regular…
This review introduces the elasticity theory of two-dimensional crystals and nematic liquid crystals on curved surfaces, the energetics of topological defects (disclinations, dislocations and pleats) in these ordered phases, and the…
Many systems in nature and the synthetic world involve ordered arrangements of units on two-dimensional surfaces. We review here the fundamental role payed by both the topology of the underlying surface and its detailed curvature. Topology…
We consider a perfectly homogeneous and isotropic universe which undergoes a sudden phase transition. If the transition produces topological defects, which we assume, perturbations in the geometry and the cosmic fluid also suddenly appear.…
Many molecular theories of nematic liquid crystals consider the constituent molecules as cylindrically symmetric. In many cases, this approximation may be useful. However the molecules of real nematics have lower symmetry. Therefore a…
The Debye-H\"uckel theory describes rigorously the thermal equilibrium of classical Coulomb fluids in the high-temperature $\beta\to 0$ regime ($\beta$ denotes the inverse temperature). It is generally believed that the Debye-H\"uckel…
Discrete models of dislocations in cubic crystal lattices having one or two atoms per unit cell are proposed. These models have the standard linear anisotropic elasticity as their continuum limit and their main ingredients are the elastic…
Liquid crystals consisting of biaxial particles can exhibit a much richer phase behavior than their uniaxial counterparts. Usually, one has to rely on simulation results to understand the phase diagram of these systems, since very few…
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…
Rapid progress has been made in observations of the temperature anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). These observations have enabled cosmologists to characterize the state of the universe at recombination, and…
The geometric shape, symmetry, and topology of colloidal particles often allow for controlling colloidal phase behavior and physical properties of these soft matter systems. In liquid crystalline dispersions, colloidal particles with low…
In this PhD thesis, we study topological defects in two-dimensional non-equilibrium systems, focusing on active extensions of the XY model, including activity, mobility and non-reciprocity. In a noisy Kuramoto lattice with short-range…
We show that the number of distinct topological states associated to a given knotted defect, $L$, in a nematic liquid crystal is equal to the determinant of the link $L$. We give an interpretation of these states, demonstrate how they may…
When a liquid is cooled below its melting temperature, if crystallization is avoided, it forms a glass. This phenomenon, called glass transition, is characterized by a marked increase of viscosity, about 14 orders of magnitude, in a narrow…
Using the density functional formalism we derive expression for the distortion free energy for systems with continuous broken symmetry and use it to derive expression for the elastic constants of smectic phases in which director is tilted…
Long-range e.g. Coulomb-like interactions for (quantized) topological charges are observed experimentally in liquid crystals, bringing open question this article is exploring: how far can we take this resemblance with particle physics?…