相关论文: Energy surface and minimum energy paths for Fr\'{e…
We study minimum-energy pathways (MEPs) between the branches of metastable helical structures in chiral nematic liquid crystals (CNLCs)subjected to the electric field applied across the cell. By performing stability analysis we have found…
Fr\'eedericksz transitions in nematic liquid crystals are re-examined with a focus on differences between systems with magnetic fields and those with electric fields. A magnetic field can be treated as uniform in a liquid-crystal medium;…
In this paper, a Freedericksz-like positional transition is found for a spherical micro-droplet suspended in a nematic liquid crystal cell in the presence of an external electric field. Based on the numerical calculation of elastic energy…
We apply the minimum energy paths (MEPs) approach to study the helix unwinding transition in chiral nematic liquid crystals. A mechanism of the transition is determined by a MEP passing through a first order saddle point on the free energy…
The critical field of the Freedericksz transition and switching dynamics are investigated for polymer stabilized nematic liquid crystals as a function of polymer concentration. A simple phenomenological model is proposed to describe the…
We report experimental and numerical evidences that the dynamics of the director of a liquid crystal driven by an electric field close to the critical point of the Fr\'eedericksz Transition(FT) is not described by a Landau-Ginzburg (LG)…
The planar bistable device [Tsakonas \textit{et al., Appl. Phys. Lett.}, 2007, {\textbf{90}}, 111913] is known to have two distinct classes of stable equilibria: the diagonal and rotated solutions. We model this device within the…
Systems involving nematic liquid crystals subjected to magnetic fields or electric fields are modeled using the Oseen-Frank macroscopic continuum theory, and general criteria are developed to assess the local stability of equilibrium…
Cholesteric liquid crystals exhibit great morphological richness of static metastable states. Understanding the transitions between such states is key for the development of switchable devices. We show, using a quasi-one-dimensional model,…
Electric field-induced splay of molecular orientation, called the Fr\'eedericksz transition, is a fundamental electro-optic phenomenon in nonpolar nematic liquid crystals. In a ferroelectric nematic NF with a spontaneous electric…
Much is known about the Freedericksz transition induced by uniform electric and magnetic fields in nematic liquid crystals. Here we study the effects of a spatially varying field on the transition. We study the response of a nematic to a…
We study both theoretically and experimentally switching dynamics in surface stabilized ferroelectric liquid crystal cells with asymmetric boundary conditions. In these cells the bounding surfaces are treated differently to produce…
In this work we numerically study the switching dynamics of a 2D cholesteric emulsion droplet immersed in an isotropic fluid under an electric field, which is either uniform or rotating with constant speed. The overall dynamics depend…
The orientation fluctuations of the director of a liquid crystal(LC) are measured after a quench near the Fr\'eedericksz transition, which is a second order transition driven by an electric field. We report experimental evidence that,…
The minimum energy path (MEP) is the most probable transition path that connects two equilibrium states of a potential energy landscape. It has been widely used to study transition mechanisms as well as transition rates in the fields of…
We report on a novel method of dynamically controlling the boundary conditions at the surface of a nematic liquid crystal using a surface flexoelectric effect. By moving the surface directors we show that one is able to manipulate defects…
We study light transmission through a homeotropically oriented nematic liquid crystal cell and solve self-consistently a nonlinear equation for the nematic director coupled to Maxwell's equations. We demonstrate that above a certain…
We have written expressions for the free energy of a cholesteric liquid crystal in an approximation using the elasticity constants K_1, K_2, K_3 and the energy variation and the corresponding energy and energy gradient along the direction…
If a surface stabilized ferroelectric liquid crystal cell is cooled from the smectic-A to the smectic-C phase, its layers thin causing V-shaped (chevron like) defects to form. These create an energy barrier that can prevent switching…
Theoretical study of dynamical phenomena induced by a linearly polarized plane wave incident perpendicularly on a planar aligned nematic layer with the light intensity as the control parameter is reported. We find the threshold of the…