相关论文: Smectic Liquid Crystals: Materials with One-Dimens…
Chemical reactions and biological processes are often governed by the structure and transport dynamics of the interface between two liquid phases. Despite their importance, our microscopic understanding of liquid-liquid interfaces has been…
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…
If a surface stabilized ferroelectric liquid crystal cell is cooled from the smectic-A to the smectic-C phase, its layers thin causing V-shaped (chevron like) defects to form. These create an energy barrier that can prevent switching…
A wide range of materials can exist in microscopically disordered solid forms, referred to as amorphous solids or glasses. Such materials -- oxide glasses and metallic glasses, to polymer glasses, and soft solids such as colloidal glasses,…
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…
Modeling liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) at the molecular level is crucial for the predictable design of energy-conversion and stimuli-responsive materials. Here, we develop a self-consistent field theory for LCEs which captures the…
The geometric shape, symmetry, and topology of colloidal particles often allow for controlling colloidal phase behavior and physical properties of these soft matter systems. In liquid crystalline dispersions, colloidal particles with low…
Liquid crystals offer many unique opportunities to study various phase transitions with continuous symmetry in the presence of quenched random disorder (QRD). The QRD arises from the presence of porous solids in the form of a random gel…
We report the discovery of a mixed orientational structure in the quasi-one-dimensional fluid of hard non-spherical bodies with the exact calculation of the thermodynamic and structural quantities using the transfer operator method. The…
In this work, we investigate the topological properties of knotted defects in smectic liquid crystals. Our story begins with screw dislocations, whose radial surface structure can be smoothly accommodated on $S^3$ for fibred knots by using…
Colloidal particles dispersed in liquid crystals can form new materials with tunable elastic and electro-optic properties. In a periodic `blue phase' host, particles should template into colloidal crystals with potential uses in photonics,…
Smectic liquid crystals can be viewed as model systems for lamellar structures for which there has been extensive theoretical development. We demonstrate that a nonlinear energy description is required with respect to the usual Landau-de…
Comparative study of thin film Cholesteric Liquid Crystal (CLC) lasers made from different materials and optically pumped by external solid state laser reveals a striking dependence of lasing behaviour (ranging from single mode at the edge…
We study the dynamics of a one-component liquid constrained on a spherical substrate, a 2-sphere, and investigate how the mode-coupling theory (MCT) can describe the new features brought by the presence of curvature. To this end we have…
We give a topological classification of defect lines in cholesteric liquid crystals using methods from contact topology. By focusing on the role played by the chirality of the material, we demonstrate a fundamental distinction between…
When a droplet containing a concentrated suspension evaporates in a dry environment, a layer often forms at the interface accumulating non-volatile material. Such a "skin layer" experiences strong stresses and eventually turns mechanically…
We investigate regular configurations of a small number of particles settling under gravity in a viscous fluid. The particles do not touch each other and can move relative to each other. The dynamics is analyzed in the point-particle…
We have calculated the phase diagrams of one--component fluids made of five types of biaxial particles differing in their cross sections. The orientation of the principal particle axis is fixed in space, while the second axis is allowed to…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
We investigate the ordering properties of vertically-vibrated monolayers of granular cylinders in a circular container at high packing fraction. In line with previous works by other groups, we identify liquid-crystalline ordering behaviour…