相关论文: Smectic Liquid Crystals: Materials with One-Dimens…
The discovery of fluid states of matter with spontaneous bulk polar order is appreciated as a major discovery in the fields of soft matter and liquid crystals. Typically, this manifests as polar order superimposed atop conventional phase…
Fluids with spatial density variations of single or mixed molecules play a key role in biophysics, soft matter and materials science. The fluid structures usually form via spinodal decomposition or nucleation following an instantaneous…
Identifying the regions responsible for plastic flow in amorphous solids remains an open problem, since structural disorder seems to prevent the direct application of concepts such as dislocations, topological defects that successfully…
In culture migrating and interacting amoeboid cells can form nematic liquid crystal phases. A polar nematic liquid crystal is formed if the interaction has a polar symmetry. One type of white blood cells (granulocytes) form clusters where…
Thin cylindrical tethers are common lipid bilayer membrane structures, arising in situations ranging from micromanipulation experiments on artificial vesicles to the dynamic structure of the Golgi apparatus. We study the shape and formation…
The hydrodynamics of smectic films at an air-water interface is discussed, with particular focus on the viscous response of the film under flow normal to the layers. The corrections to the response functions of the smectic phase, arising…
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…
Many bent-core nematic liquid crystals exhibit unusual physical properties due to the presence of smectic clusters, known as "cybotactic" clusters in the nematic phase. Effect of these clusters on complex shear modulus ($G^*(\omega)$) of…
A new type of a levitating droplet clusters composed of often transforming small aggregates of water droplets is described for the first time. Unlike earlier observed droplet clusters controlled by aerodynamic forces, which formed either an…
The complexity of condensed matter arises from emergent behaviors that cannot be understood by analyzing individual constituents in isolation. While traditional condensed-matter approaches-developed primarily for ideal crystalline…
We study the phase behaviour of a quasi-two dimensional cholesteric liquid crystal shell. We characterise the topological phases arising close to the isotropic-cholesteric transition, and show that they differ in a fundamental way from…
We investigate the sedimentation of a cloud of rigid, spherical particles of identical radii under gravity in a Stokes fluid. Both inertia and rotation of particles are neglected. We consider the homogenization limit of many small particles…
Architected materials achieve unique mechanical properties through precisely engineered microstructures that minimize material usage. However, a key challenge of low-density materials is balancing high stiffness with stable deformability up…
We show that a simple two dimensional model of spin crossover materials gives rise to spin-state smectic phases where the pattern of high-spin (HS) and low-spin (LS) metal centers spontaneously breaks rotational symmetry and translational…
There are two prominent applications of the mathematical concept of topology to the physics of materials: band topology, which classifies different topological insulators and semimetals, and topological defects that represent immutable…
Deformations that conserve the parallelism and the distances --between layers, in smectic phases; between columns, in columnar phases-- are commonplace in liquid crystals. The resulting deformed textures have the same mass density as in the…
We demonstrate spontaneous wrinkling as a transient dynamical pattern in thin freely floating smectic liquid-crystalline films. The peculiarity of such films is that, while flowing liquid-like in the film plane, they cannot quickly expand…
Supercooled liquids are sometimes described as being composed of a mosaic of patches that may be listed in a `library', each one having some form of non-periodic order. Looking closer, one finds this construction elusive. In attempting to…
Topological insulators as new type of quantum matter materials are characterized by a full insulating gap in the bulk and gapless edge/surface states which are protected by time-reversal symmetry. We propose the interference patterns caused…
A crystal lattice, when confined to the surface of a cylinder, must have a periodic structure that is commensurate with the cylinder circumference. This constraint can frustrate the system, leading to oblique crystal lattices or to…