相关论文: Geometric frustration and compatibility conditions…
We analytically and numerically characterize the structure of hard-sphere fluids in order to review various geometrical frustration scenarios of the glass transition. We find generalized polytetrahedral order to be correlated with…
From incompressible flows to electrostatics, harmonic functions can provide solutions to many two-dimensional problems and, similarly, the director field of a planar nematic can be determined using complex analysis. We derive a closed-form…
Thin nematic elastomers, composite hydrogels and plant tissues are among many systems that display uniform anisotropic deformation upon external actuation. In these materials, the spatial orientation variation of a local director field…
Polymer-grafted nanoparticles are versatile building blocks that self-assemble into a rich diversity of mesostructures. Coarse-grained molecular simulations have commonly accompanied experiments by resolving structure formation pathways and…
Geometric frustration is a fundamental concept in various areas of physics, and its role in self-assembly processes has recently been recognized as a source of intricate self-limited structures. Here we present an analytic theory of the…
We present a theoretical study of the director fields and energetics of nematic liquid crystal shells with two pairs of surface defects. The pairs of defects can undergo abrupt transitions between a configuration of maximum separation to at…
Frustration in nematic-ordered media (endowed with a director field) is treated in a purely geometric fashion in a flat, two-dimensional space. We recall the definition of quasi-uniform distortions and envision these as viable ways to…
Geometric frustration results from a discrepancy between the locally favored arrangement of the constituents of a system and the geometry of the embedding space. Geometric frustration can be either non-cumulative, which implies an extensive…
Controlling the self-assembly of supramolecular structures is vital for living cells, and a central challenge for engineering at the nano- and microscales. Nevertheless, even particles without optimized shapes can robustly form well-defined…
We study the mechanical behavior of two-dimensional cellular tissues by formulating the continuum limit of discrete vertex models based on an energy that penalizes departures from a target area $A_0$ and a target perimeter $P_0$ for the…
The properties of liquid crystals can be modelled using an order parameter which describes the variability of the local orientation of rod-like molecules. Defects in the director field can arise due to external factors such as applied…
We solve the forward and inverse problems associated with the transformation of flat sheets to surfaces of revolution with non-trivial topography, including Gaussian curvature, without a stretch elastic cost. We deal with systems slender…
By means of computer simulations we study how droplets of hard, rod-like particles optimize their shape and internal structure under the influence of the osmotic compression caused by the presence of spherical particles that act as…
Various director configurations of a nematic liquid crystal, confined in a toroidal volume and subject to an external magnetic field, were evaluated numerically by performing finite element calculations in three dimensions. The equilibrium…
Curved particles have been shown to stabilize a range of states with unique order in dense suspensions of colloidal bent core liquid crystals. The shape of the colloidal rods encourages the formation of curved director fields. However,…
Nematic liquid crystals confined to geometrically as well as chemically patterned substrate on one end and a flat substrate with strong anchoring on the other is studied using non-Boltzmann Monte Carlo methods. We observe significant…
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…
Geometric incompatibility, the inability of a material's rest state to be realized in Euclidean space, underlies shape formation in natural and synthetic thin sheets. Classical Gauss and Mainardi-Codazzi-Peterson (MCP) incompatibilities…
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…
Geometrically frustrated solids with non-Euclidean reference metric are ubiquitous in biology and are becoming increasingly relevant in technological applications. Often they acquire a targeted con- figuration of incompatibility through…