相关论文: Polar Molecular Organisation in Liquid Crystals
The dipole flexoelectric (FE) polarization in liquid crystals is derived in the thermodynamic limit at small distortions and small density. General microscopic expressions for the FE coefficients are obtained in the case of the uniaxial and…
I describe new phases of a chiral liquid crystal with nematic and hexatic order. I find a conical phase, similar to that of a cholesteric in an applied magnetic field for Frank elastic constants $K_2>K_3$. I discuss the role of fluctuations…
Building on the striking similarity between the structure of the spindle during mitosis in living cells and nematic textures in confined liquid crystals, we use a continuum model of two-dimensional nematic liquid crystal droplets, to…
The newly-discovered ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal exhibits a variety of unique defect phenomena. The depolarization field in the material favors spontaneous spatial variations in polarization, manifesting in diverse forms such as…
Nanostructured ferroelectrics display exotic multidomain configurations resulting from the electrostatic and elastic boundary conditions they are subject to. While the ferroelectric domains appear frozen in experimental images, atomistic…
Spherical microparticles dispersed in nematic liquid crystals have been extensively investigated in the past years. Here, we report experimental studies on the elastic deformation, colloidal interaction and self-assembly of hematite…
The distinctive characteristics of water, evident in its thermodynamic anomalies, have implications across disciplines from biology to geophysics. Considered a valid hypothesis to rationalize its unique properties, a liquid-liquid phase…
Working in two space dimensions, we show that the orientational order emerging from self-propelled polar particles aligning nematically is quasi-long-ranged beyond $\ell_{\rm r}$, the scale associated to induced velocity reversals, which is…
Colloidal particles in a liquid crystal (LC) behave very differently from their counterparts in isotropic fluids. Elastic nature of the orientational order and surface anchoring of the director cause long-range anisotropic interactions and…
Instabilities are discussed which take place when a nematic liquid crystal (LC) layer, enclosed between a planar reference plate and a photosensitive substrate, is illuminated with polarized light from the reference side ({\it reverse}…
Liquid crystals formed by acute-angle bent-core (ABC) molecules with a 1,7 naphthalene central core show an intriguing phase behavior with the nematic phase accompanied by poorly understood additional phases. In this work, we characterize…
Freezing of charged colloids on square or triangular two-dimensional periodic substrates has been recently shown to realize a rich variety of orientational orders. We propose a theoretical framework to analyze the corresponding structures.…
We describe a new type of spatially periodic structure (lattice models): a polaritonic crystal (PolC) formed by a two-dimensional lattice of trapped two-level atoms interacting with quantised electromagnetic field in a cavity (or in a…
In liquid crystal elastomers, the orientational order of liquid crystals is coupled with elastic distortions of crosslinked polymer networks. Previous theoretical research has described these materials through two different approaches: a…
The flexoelectric (FE) effect provides a linear coupling between electric polarization and orientational deformation in liquid crystals. It influences many electrooptical phenomena and it is used in some bistable nematic devices. A…
Concentrated colloidal suspensions of nanorods often exhibit liquid-crystalline (LC) behavior. The transition to a nematic LC phase, with long-range orientational order of the particles, is usually well captured by Onsager's theory for hard…
Spontaneous self-assembly of hard convex polyhedra are known to form orientationally disordered crystalline phases, where particle orientations do not follow the same pattern as the positional arrangement of the crystal. A distinct type of…
A promising approach of designing mesostructured materials with novel physical behavior is to combine unique optical and electronic properties of solid nanoparticles with long-range ordering and facile response of soft matter to weak…
We present a simplified molecular model of mesogenic dimers consisting of two identical uniaxial mesogenic cores separated by a fixed-length spacer and allowed to assume only two, statistically equivalent, conformations which are non-planar…
We apply density functional theory to study the influence of polydispersity on the stability of columnar, smectic and solid ordering in the solutions of rodlike macromolecules. For sufficiently large length polydispersity (standard…