相关论文: Buckling transition of nematic gels in confined ge…

We derive a multiphysics model that accounts for network elasticity with spontaneous strains, swelling and nematic interactions in liquid crystal gels (LCGs). We discuss the coupling among the various physical mechanisms, with particular…

Understanding and controlling the director field configuration, shape, and orientation in nematic and cholesteric liquid crystals is of fundamental importance in several branches of science. Liquid crystalline droplets, also known as…

Linear defects such as dislocations and disclinations in ordered materials attract foreign particles since they replace strong elastic distortions at the defect cores. In this work, we explore the behavior of isotropic droplets nucleating…

Liquid crystal elastomers are cross-linked polymer networks covalently bonded with liquid crystal mesogens. In the nematic phase, due to strong coupling between mechanical strain and orientational order, these materials display…

The structural arrest of a polymeric suspension might be driven by an increase of the cross--linker concentration, that drives the gel transition, as well as by an increase of the polymer density, that induces a glass transition. These…

Two dimensional crystalline membranes in isotropic embedding space exhibit a flat phase with anomalous elasticity, relevant e.g., for graphene. Here we study their thermal fluctuations in the absence of exact rotational invariance in the…

Liquid crystal elastomers realize a fascinating new form of soft matter that is a composite of a conventional crosslinked polymer gel (rubber) and a liquid crystal. These {\em solid} liquid crystal amalgams, quite similarly to their…

Most, but not all, liquid crystals tend to align when subject to shear flow, while most nematic polymeric liquid crystals undergo a tumbling instability, where the director rotate with the flow. The reasons of this instability remain…

The ability to manipulate polar entities with multiple external fields opens exciting possibilities for emerging functionalities and novel applications in spin systems, photonics, metamaterials, and soft matter. Liquid crystals (LCs),…

We present a study on swelling-induced circumferential buckling of tubular shaped gels. Inhomogeneous stress develops as gel swells under mechanical constraints, which gives rise to spontaneous buckling instability without external force.…

Dispersed colloidal particles within a suspension can aggregate and spontaneously self-organize into a robust, percolating structure known as a gel. These network-like structures are prevalent in nature and play a critical role in many…

When a nematic liquid crystal (LC) is confined on a self-closing spherical shell, topological constraints arise with intriguing consequences that depend critically on how the LC is aligned in the shell. We demonstrate reversible dynamic…

In a nematic gel, the appearance of nematic order is accompanied by a spontaneous elongation of the gel parallel to the nematic director. If such a gel is made chiral, it has a tendency to form a cholesteric helical texture, in which local…

Liquid crystalline networks (LCNs) are stimuli-responsive materials formed from polymeric chains cross-linked with rod-like mesogenic segments, which, in the nematic phase, align along a non-polar director. A key characteristic of these…

Instabilities in thin elastic sheets, such as wrinkles, are of broad interest both from a fundamental viewpoint and also because of their potential for engineering applications. Nematic liquid crystal elastomers offer a new form of control…

Modeling liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) at the molecular level is crucial for the predictable design of energy-conversion and stimuli-responsive materials. Here, we develop a self-consistent field theory for LCEs which captures the…

Mono-layers of stearic and behenic acids and mixtures of them in different proportions, deposited with the Langmuir-Blodgett technique, were used to study the alignment and the alignment dynamics in nematic liquid crystal cells. A…

A nematic liquid-crystal gel is a macroscopically homogeneous elastic medium with the rotational symmetry of a nematic liquid crystal. In this paper, we develop a general approach to the study of these gels that incorporates all underlying…

I put forward a continuum theory for active nematic gels, defined as fluids or suspensions of orientable rodlike objects endowed with active dynamics, that is based on symmetry arguments and compatibility with thermodynamics. The starting…

In uniaxial soft matter with a reorientational nonlinearity, such as nematic liquid crystals, a light beam in the extraordinary polarization walks off its wavevector due to birefringence, while it undergoes self-focusing via an increase in…