相关论文: Morphogenesis of defects and tactoids during isotr…
The transition from a nematic to an isotropic state in a self-closing spherical liquid crystal shell with tangential alignment is a stimulating phenomenon to investigate, as the topology dictates that the shell exhibits local isotropic…
Liquid crystals are assemblies of rod-like molecules which self-organize to form mesophases, in-between ordinary liquids and anisotropic crystals. At each point, the molecules collectively orient themselves along a privileged direction,…
Morphogenesis of living systems involves topological shape transformations which are highly unusual in the inanimate world. Here we demonstrate that a droplet of a nematic liquid crystal changes its equilibrium shape from a simply-connected…
Motivated by recent experiments, the isotropic-nematic phase transition in chromonic liquid crystals is studied. As temperature decreases, nematic nuclei nucleate, grow, and coalesce, giving rise to tactoid microstructures in an isotropic…
We study two dimensional tactoids in nematic liquid crystals by using a $\mathbf{Q}$-tensor representation. A bulk free energy of the Maier-Saupe form with eigenvalue constraints on $\mathbf{Q}$, plus elastic terms up to cubic order in…
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…
Anisotropic rod-like particles form liquid crystalline phases with varying degrees of orientational and translational order. When confined geometrically, these phases can give rise to topological defects, which can be selected and…
We analyze the phase behavior of lyotropic nematic liquid crystals in the self-organizing flow, viz. so called active nematics (AN). Their elastic properties are mutually caused by evolution of topological defects (for instance,…
A high-resolution dielectric and calorimetric study of the isotropic (I) to nematic (N) phase transition of carbon nanotube (CNT) dispersed liquid crystal (LC) functional composites as a function of CNT concentration is reported. The…
We demonstrate that a first order isotropic-to-nematic phase transition in liquid crystals can be succesfully modeled within the generalized Landau-de Gennes theory by selecting an appropriate combination of elastic constants. The numerical…
We study the phase behaviour of cholesteric liquid crystal shells with different geometries. We compare the cases of tangential and no anchoring at the surface, focussing on the former case, which leads to a competition between the…
There is now growing evidence of the emergence and biological functionality of liquid crystal features, including nematic order and topological defects, in cellular tissues. However, how such features that intrinsically rely on particle…
We study the chiral symmetry breaking and metastability of confined nematic lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal (LCLC) with and without chiral dopants. The isotropic-nematic coexistence phase of the LCLC renders two confining geometries:…
Liquid crystal droplets are of great interest from physics and applications. Rigorous mathematical analysis is challenging as the problem involves harmonic maps (and in general the Oseen-Frank model), free interfaces and topological defects…
For isotropic fluids, classical nucleation theory predicts the nucleation rate, barrier height and critical droplet size by accounting for the competition between bulk energy and interfacial tension. The nucleation process in liquid…
We analyze a model problem based on highly disparate elastic constants that we propose in order to understand corners and cusps that form on the boundary between the nematic and isotropic phases in a liquid crystal. For a bounded planar…
Using computer simulations we investigate the microscopic structure of the singular director field within a nematic droplet. As a theoretical model for nematic liquid crystals we take hard spherocylinders. To induce an overall topological…
We exploit the long-ranged elastic fields inherent to confined nematic liquid crystals to assemble colloidal particles trapped at the liquid crystal interface into reconfigurable structures with complex symmetries and packings. Spherical…
We consider the weakly first order phase transition between the isotropic and ordered phases of nematics in terms of the behavior of topological line defects. Analytical and Monte Carlo results are presented for a new coarse-grained lattice…
This study theoretically investigates how anisotropic curved membrane components (CMCs) control vesicle morphology through curvature sensing, nematic alignment, topological defects, and volume constraints. By comparing arc-shaped and…