相关论文: Surface alignment disorder and pseudo-Casimir forc…
The interplay between disorder and interactions can dramatically influence the physical properties of thin-film superconductors. In the most extreme case, strong disorder is able to suppress superconductivity as an insulating phase emerges.…
Surface-induced liquid crystalline phase transitions evoke fundamental interest and can provide deeper insight into the nature of low-dimensional phase transitions. Board-like conjugated polymers are particularly interesting because they…
Mesoscopic particles immersed in a critical fluid experience long-range Casimir forces due to critical fluctuations. Using field theoretical methods, we investigate the Casimir interaction between two spherical particles and between a…
Motivated by recent experiments with confined binary liquid mixtures near demixing, we study the universal critical properties of a system, which belongs to the Ising universality class, in the film geometry. We employ periodic boundary…
Comprehensive x-ray scattering studies have characterized the smectic ordering of octylcyanobiphenyl (8CB) confined in the hydrogen-bonded silica gels formed by aerosil dispersions. For all densities of aerosil and all measurement…
We investigate the effect of annealed disorder on the mechanical properties and plasticity of a modeled amorphous solid by introducing a small fraction of heavy impurities into the material which resembles real experimental systems. The…
Investigations of the elastic behavior of bulk elastomers have traditionally proceeded on the basis of classical rubber elasticity, which regards chains as thermally fluctuating but disregards the thermal fluctuations of the cross-links.…
We study the effect of quenched randomness in the arc-length dependent spontaneous curvature of a wormlike chain under tension. In the weakly bending approximation in two dimensions, we obtain analytic results for the force-elongation curve…
By Monte Carlo simulations of a soft ellipsoid model for liquid crystals, we study whether a layer of grafted liquid-crystalline chain molecules can induce tilt in a nematic fluid. The chains are fairly short (four monomers) and made of the…
Mechanically quenching a thin film of smectic-C liquid crystal results in the formation of a dense array of thousands of topological defects in the director field. The subsequent rapid coarsening of the film texture by the mutual…
In this Letter we discuss theoretically the instabilities of thermotropic freely standing smectic-A films under shear flow\cite{re:wu}. We show that, in Couette geometry, the centrifugal force pushes the liquid crystal toward the outer…
Monopolar charge disorder effects are studied in the context of fluctuation-induced interactions between neutral dielectric slabs. It is shown that quenched bulk charge disorder gives rise to an additive contribution to the net interaction…
Coupling between flow and orientation is a central issue in understanding the collective dynamics of active biofilaments and cells. Active stresses generated by motor activity destroy (quasi-)long-range orientational order and induce…
We study both theoretically and experimentally anchoring properties of photoaligning azo-dye films in contact with a nematic liquid crystal depending on photoinduced ordering of azo-dye molecules. In the mean field approximation, we found…
We study smectic liquid crystals in random environments, e.g., aerogel. A low temperature analysis reveals that even arbitrarily weak quenched disorder (i.e., arbitrarily low aerogel density) destroys translational (smectic) order. A…
We develop a general formalism to investigate the effect of quenched fixed charge disorder on effective electrostatic interactions between charged surfaces in a one-component (counterion-only) Coulomb fluid. Analytical results are…
We study the influence of quenched disorder on the two-dimensional melting behavior by using both video-microscopy of superparamagnetic colloidal particles and computer simulations of repulsive parallel dipoles. Quenched disorder is…
We explain theoretically peculiarities of the smectic A -- hexatic B equilibrium phase coexistence in a finite temperature range recently observed experimentally in free standing smectic films [I.A.Zaluzhnyy et al., Physical Review E,…
In the mean field approximation, we evaluate the temperature dependence of the anchoring energy strength of a nematic liquid crystal in contact with a solid substrate due to thermal fluctuations. Our study is limited to the weak anchoring…
The anchoring of nematic liquid crystals on surfaces with grafted liquid crystalline chain molecules is studied by computer simulations and within a mean field approach. The computer simulations show that a swollen layer of collectively…