相关论文: Magnetic Tilting in Nematic Liquid Crystals driven…
Shape morphing magnetic soft materials, composed of magnetic particles in a soft polymer matrix, can transform shapes reversibly, remotely, and rapidly, finding diverse applications in actuators, soft robotics, and biomedical devices. To…
Self-assembly of nanoparticles at fluid-fluid interfaces is a promising route to fabricate functional materials from the bottom-up. However, directing and controlling particles into highly tunable and predictable structures -- while…
The ordering of nanoparticles into predetermined configurations is of importance to the design of advanced technologies. In this work, we moderate the surface anchoring against the bulk elasticity of liquid crystals to dynamically shape…
Most, but not all, liquid crystals tend to align when subject to shear flow, while most nematic polymeric liquid crystals undergo a tumbling instability, where the director rotate with the flow. The reasons of this instability remain…
Tunable composite materials with interesting physical behavior can be designed through integrating unique optical properties of solid nanostructures with the facile responses of soft matter to weak external stimuli, but this approach…
We report an extensive molecular dynamics study on the translational dynamics of a hybrid system composed of dipolar soft spheres (DSS), representing ferromagnetic particles, suspended in a liquid crystal (LC) matrix. We observe that the LC…
We study by simulation the physics of two colloidal particles in a cholesteric liquid crystal with tangential order parameter alignment at the particle surface. The effective force between the pair is attractive at short range and favors…
Molecules of a nematic liquid crystal respond to an applied magnetic field by reorienting themselves in the direction of the field. Since the dielectric anisotropy of a nematic is small, it takes relatively large fields to elicit a…
Colloids dispersed in nematic liquid crystals form topological composites in which colloid-associated defects mediate interactions while adhering to fundamental topological constraints. Better realising the promise of such materials…
Dispersions of rodlike colloidal particles exhibit a plethora of liquid crystalline states, including nematic, smectic A, smectic B, and columnar phases. This phase behavior can be explained by presuming the predominance of hard-core volume…
Topological defects are distinctive signatures of liquid crystals. They profoundly affect the viscoelastic behavior of the fluid by constraining the orientational structure in a way that inevitably requires global changes not achievable…
Colloidal self-assembly -- the spontaneous organization of colloids into ordered structures -- has been considered key to produce next-generation materials. However, the present-day staggering variety of colloidal building blocks and the…
The self-assembly of metallic colloidal clusters (so called plasmonic metamolecules) has been viewed as a versatile, but highly effective approach for the materialization of the metamaterials exhibiting artificial magnetism at optical…
We demonstrate several examples of driving and steering of colloids when dispersed in nematic liquid crystals. The driving mechanism is based on the principle of nonlinear electrophoresis which is mediated by the asymmetry in the structure…
In recent years, certain molecular crystals have been reported to possess surprising flexibility by undergoing significant elastic or plastic deformation in response to mechanical loads. However, despite this experimental evidence, there…
Very recently, the construction of twist actuators from magnetorheological gels and elastomers has been suggested. These materials consist of magnetizable colloidal particles embedded in a soft elastic polymeric environment. The twist…
There is a recent interest in studying odd elasticity in soft solids. Current focus has been on simple solids. However, many soft solids are structured and can exhibit nematic elasticity or viscoelasticity. Here we generalize the concept of…
Designing protocols to dynamically direct the self-assembly of colloidal particles has become an important direction in soft matter physics because of the promising applications in fabrication of dynamic responsive functional materials.…
Self-assembly is the process in which the components of a system, whether molecules, polymers, or macroscopic particles, are organized into ordered structures as a result of local interactions between the components themselves, without…
A novel type of hybrid colloids is presented, based on the association of several polymeric systems and ferrofluids. On the one hand, we use inorganic nanoparticles made of magnetic iron oxide prepared at the LI2C, which response to a…