相关论文: Shaping thin nematic films with competing boundary…

Nematic interfaces are thin fluid films, ideally two-dimensional, endowed with an in-plane degenerate nematic order. In this letter we examine a generalisation of the classical Plateau problem to an axisymmetric nematic interface bounded by…

The confining effect of a spherical substrate inducing anchoring (normal to the surface) of rod-like liquid crystal molecules contained in a thin film spread over it has been investigated with regard to possible changes in the nature of the…

We discuss the long-wave hydrodynamic model for a thin film of nematic liquid crystal in the limit of strong anchoring at the free surface and at the substrate. We rigorously clarify how the elastic energy enters the evolution equation for…

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…

Dynamics at low Reynolds numbers experiences recent revival in the fields of biophysics and active matter. While in bulk isotropic fluids it is exhaustively studied, this is less so in anisotropic fluids and in confined situations. Here, we…

Thin liquid films on surfaces are part of our everyday life, they serve e.g. as coatings or lubricants. The stability of a thin layer is governed by interfacial forces, described by the effective interface potential, and has been subject of…

We investigate the structure of nematic liquid crystal thin films described by the Landau--de Gennes tensor-valued order parameter with Dirichlet boundary conditions of nonzero degree. We prove that as the elasticity constant goes to zero a…

A thin liquid film with non-zero curvature at its free surface spontaneously flows to reach a flat configuration, a process driven by Laplace pressure gradients and resisted by the liquid's viscosity. Inspired by recent progresses on the…

We consider thin fluid films placed on thermally conductive substrates and exposed to time-dependent spatially uniform heat source. The evolution of the films is considered within the long-wave framework in the regime such that both…

Starting from a three-dimensional description of an active nematic layer, we employ an asymptotic theory to derive a series of low-dimensional continuum models that capture the coupled dynamics of flat and curved films, including variations…

Understanding the flow of liquid crystals in microfluidic environments plays an important role in many fields, including device design and microbiology. We perform hybrid lattice-Boltzmann simulations of a nematic liquid crystal flowing…

Motivated by recent experiments on the rod-like virus bacteriophage fd, confined to circular and annular domains, we present a theoretical study of structural transitions in these geometries. Using the continuum theory of nematic liquid…

Many objects in nature and industry are wrapped in a thin sheet to enhance their chemical, mechanical, or optical properties. There are similarly a variety of methods for wrapping, from pressing a film onto a hard substrate, to using…

A hydrostatically stressed soft elastic film circumvents the imposed constraint by undergoing a morphological instability, the wavelength of which is dictated by the minimization of the surface and the elastic strain energies of the film.…

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…

Achieving control and tunability of lyotropic materials has been a long-standing goal of liquid crystal research. Here we show that the elasticity of a liquid crystal system consisting of a dense suspension of semiflexible biopolymers can…

The elastic and capillary interactions between a pair of colloidal particles trapped on top of a nematic film are studied theoretically for large separations $d$. The elastic interaction is repulsive and of quadrupolar type, varying as…

Partially wetting nematic liquid crystal (NLC) films on substrates are unstable to dewetting-type instabilities due to destablizing solid/NLC interaction forces. These instabilities are modified by the nematic nature of the films, which…

Liquid crystal elastomers and glasses can have significant shape change determined by their director patterns. Cones deformed from circular director patterns have non-trivial Gaussian curvature localised at tips, curved interfaces, and…

The director configuration of disclination lines in nematic liquid crystals in the presence of an external magnetic field is evaluated. Our method is a combination of a polynomial expansion for the director and of further analytical…