相关论文: Ring around the colloid
The effective interaction between spherical colloids in nematic liquid crystals is investigated in the framework of the Landau-de Gennes theory. The colloids differ through their interaction with the nematic. While both particles induce…
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…
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…
Nematic colloids exhibit a large diversity of topological defects and structures induced by colloidal particles in the orientationally ordered liquid crystal host fluids. These defects and field configurations define elastic interactions…
Crystalline assemblages of identical sub-units packed together and elastically bent in the form of a torus have been found in the past ten years in a variety of systems of surprisingly different nature, such as viral capsids, self-assembled…
The ability to control the movement and assembly of particles in liquid crystals is not only an important route to design functional materials, but also sheds light on the mechanisms of colloidal interactions. In this study we place…
We demonstrate scaffolding of plasmonic nanoparticles by topological defects induced by colloidal microspheres to match their surface boundary conditions with a uniform far-field alignment in a liquid crystal host. Displacing energetically…
Nematic liquid crystals can dramatically reconfigure under dynamic forcing, providing exciting opportunities in active matter. Here, we study a hybrid disk colloid rotated by an external field which generates a dynamic companion topological…
Knots and knotted fields enrich physical phenomena ranging from DNA and molecular chemistry to the vortices of fluid flows and textures of ordered media. Liquid crystals provide an ideal setting for exploring such topological phenomena…
In an elegant paper, D. Nelson suggested a method to produce tetravalent colloids based on a tetrahedral configuration created on the surface of a spherical particle. It emerges from a two-dimensional nematic liquid crystal placed on a…
While active systems possess notable potential to form the foundation of new classes of autonomous materials, designing systems that can extract functional work from active surroundings has proven challenging. In this work, we extend these…
Circular swimmers with tunable orbit radius and chirality are gaining attention due to their potential to illustrate novel collective phases in simulations and synthetic and biological active matter. Here, we present a facile experimental…
Topology can manifest itself in colloids when quantified by invariants like Euler characteristics of nonzero-genus colloidal surfaces, albeit spherical colloidal particles are most often studied, and colloidal particles with complex…
An elastic quartic twist theory has recently been proposed for chromonic liquid crystals, intended to overcome the paradoxical conclusions encountered by the classical Oseen-Frank theory when applied to droplets submerged in an isotropic…
Recent experimental observations have suggested that topological defects can facilitate the creation of sharp features in developing embryos. Whereas these observations echo established knowledge about the interplay between geometry and…
We investigate experimentally and numerically the defect configurations emerging when a cholesteric liquid crystal is confined to a spherical shell. We uncover a rich scenario of defect configurations, some of them non-existent in nematic…
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…
The assembly of colloids in nematic liquid crystals via topological defects has been extensively studied for spherical particles, and investigations of other colloid shapes have revealed a wide array of new assembly behaviors. We show,…
Liquid crystals formed of bent-core molecules are exotic materials that exhibit the twist-bend nematic phase. This arises when an energetic preference for nonzero local bend distortion is accommodated via twist in the texture, resulting in…
Crystals melt when thermal excitations or the concentration of defects in the lattice is sufficiently high. Upon melting, the crystalline long-range order vanishes, turning the solid to a fluid. In contrast to this classical scenario of…