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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…
Nematic liquid crystals possess three different phases: isotropic, uniaxial, and biaxial. The ground state of most nematics is either isotropic or uniaxial, depending on the external temperature. Nevertheless, biaxial domains have been…
The phase behaviour of colloidal dispersions is interesting for fundamental reasons and for technological applications such as photonic crystals and electronic paper. Sedimentation, which in everyday life is relevant from blood analysis to…
Anisotropic fluids appear in a diverse array of systems, from liquid-crystal displays to bacterial swarms, and are characterized by orientational order. Large colloidal particles immersed in such environments disturb the medium's…
The ability to dictate colloid motion is an important challenge in fields ranging from materials science to living systems. Here, by embedding energy landscapes in confined nematic liquid crystals, we design a versatile platform to define…
A self-interacting polymer can undergo an orientational ordering transition, depending on the magnitude of the nematic interaction. The effect of embedding such a polymer into a flexible surface on this transition is studied on the…
Monopole-like electrostatic interactions are ubiquitous in biology and condensed matter, but they are often screened by counter-ions and cannot be switched from attractive to repulsive. In colloidal science, where the prime goal is to…
Outermost occupied electron shells of chemical elements can have symmetries resembling that of monopoles, dipoles, quadrupoles and octupoles corresponding to filled s-, p-, d- and forbitals. Theoretically, elements with hexadecapolar outer…
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…
The nonlinear elastic properties of nematic liquid crystals have acquired new interest with the recent experimental observation of bulk modulated nematic phases which are composed by achiral molecules. We extend the Oseen-Zocher-Frank's…
Nematic liquid crystals in a polyhedral domain, a prototype for bistable displays, may be described by a unit-vector field subject to tangent boundary conditions. Here we consider the case of a rectangular prism. For configurations with…
One of the central experimental efforts in nematic colloids research aims to explore how the interplay between the geometry of particles along with the accompanying nematic director deformations and defects around them can provide a means…
How change in molecular structure can affect relative stability and structural properties of the twist-bend nematic phase (N$_\text{TB}$)? Here we extend the mean-field model [C. Greco et al., Soft Matter, 2014, 10, 9318] for bent-shaped…
We perform Dynamic Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the equilibrium dynamics of hard colloidal cuboids in oblate and prolate nematic liquid crystals. In particular, we characterise the particles' diffusion along the nematic director…
A continuum theory is employed to numerically study the equilibrium orientation and defect structures of a circular cylindrical particle with flat ends under a homeotropic anchoring condition in a uniform nematic medium. Different aspect…
The theory of elastic interaction of micron size axially symmetric colloidal particles immersed into confined nematic liquid crystal has been proposed. General formulas are obtained for the self energy of one colloidal particle and…
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…
Curvature and mechanics are intimately connected for thin materials, and this coupling between geometry and physical properties is readily seen in folded structures from intestinal villi and pollen grains, to wrinkled membranes and…
We investigate the phase behavior of colloidal suspensions of board-like particles under the effect of an external field and assess the still disputed occurrence of the biaxial nematic (N$_\text{B}$) liquid crystal phase. The external field…
Colloidal particles in liquid crystals tend to induce topological defects and distortions of the molecular alignment within the surrounding anisotropic host medium, which results in elasticity-mediated interactions not accessible to their…