相关论文: Surface alignment disorder and pseudo-Casimir forc…
In superconducting films, the role of intrinsic disorder is typically to compete with superconductivity by fragmenting the global phase coherence and lowering the superfluid density. Nonetheless, when a transverse magnetic field is applied…
Controlling the anchoring of liquid crystal molecules at an interface with a water solution influences the entire organization of the underlying liquid crystal phase, which is crucial for many applications. The simplest way to stabilize…
A flux liquid can condense into a smectic crystal in a pure layered superconductor with the magnetic field oriented nearly parallel to the layers. Similar order can arise in low temperature $^4$He films with a highly anisotropic periodic…
The present work is essentially focused on the study of optical and structural properties of hydrogenated amorphous silicon thin films (a-Si:H) prepared by radio-frequency cathodic sputtering. We examine separately the influence of hydrogen…
We study critical Casimir forces (CCF) $f_{\mathrm C}$ for films of thickness $L$ which in the three-dimensional bulk belong to the Ising universality class and which are exposed to random surface fields (RSF) on both surfaces. We consider…
We consider the fluctuation-induced (Casimir) pressure in peptide films deposited on GaAs, Ge, and ZnS substrates which are either in dielectric or metallic state. Calculations of the Casimir pressure are performed in the framework of…
Solid materials possess both long-range order and some degree of disorder are critical for understanding the nature of crystal and glassy state, but how to controllable introduce specific type of disorder into a crystalline material is a…
We study theoretically and experimentally the solvent-mediated critical Casimir force acting on colloidal particles immersed in a binary liquid mixture of water and 2,6-lutidine and close to substrates which are chemically patterned with…
We study the effects of generalised surface disorder on the monomer-monomer model of heterogeneous catalysis, where disorder is implemented by allowing different adsorption rates for each lattice site. By mapping the system in the…
In quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) studies of the friction between an adsorbed monolayer film and a metallic substrate, the films are observed to slide relative to the substrate under inertial forces of order $10^{-14}dyn$ per film atom,…
Experimentally it is possible to manipulate the director in a (chiral) smectic-$A$ elastomer using an electric field. This suggests that the director is not necessarily locked to the layer normal, as described in earlier papers that…
We study the effects of disorder in two-dimensional quantum antiferromagnets on a square lattice, within the nonlinear sigma model approach, by using of a random distribution of spin stiffnesses or zero-temperature-spin-gaps, respectively,…
Properties of thin films of geometrically frustrated ABC stacked antiferromagnetic kagome layers are examined using Metropolis Monte Carlo simulations. The impact of having an easy-axis anisotropy on the surface layers and cubic anisotropy…
Monte Carlo simulation, experiment and continuum theory are used to examine the anchoring exhibited by a nematic liquid crystal at a patterned substrate comprising a periodic array of rectangles that, respectively, promote vertical and…
We investigate theoretically the elliptical shapes of soft colloids in freely standing smectic C films, that have been reported recently. The colloids favour parallel alignment of the liquid crystal molecules at their surfaces and, for…
We investigate the thermal Casimir force between two parallel plates made of different isotropic materials which are separated by a uniaxial anisotropic film. Numerical computations of the Casimir pressure at T=300K are performed using the…
Very high magnetic anisotropies have been theoretically predicted for strained Fe-Co(-X) and indeed several experiments on epitaxial thin films seemed to confirm strain induced anisotropy enhancement. This study presents a critical analysis…
The Casimir--Polder interaction between an anisotropic particle and a surface is orientation dependent. We study novel orientational effects that arise due to curvature of the surface for distances much smaller than the radii of curvature…
We investigate, by means of the scattering approach, the Casimir-Polder interaction between a neutral anisotropic polarizable particle and a corrugated surface made of a realistic material. By focusing on the lateral force (arising from the…
We investigate the effects of layered quenched disorder on the behavior of planar magnets, superfluids, and superconductors by performing large-scale Monte-Carlo simulations of a three-dimensional randomly layered XY model. Our data provide…