相关论文: Self-assembly in the major ampullate gland of Neph…
We report curling self-propulsion in aqueous emulsions of common mesogenic compounds. Nematic liquid crystal droplets self-propel in a surfactant solution with concentrations above the critical micelle concentration while undergoing…
A spontaneous buckling transition in thin layers of monodomain nematic liquid crystalline gel was observed by polarized light microscopy. The coupling between the orientational ordering of liquid crystalline solvent and the translational…
An essential element in the web-trap architecture, the capture silk spun by ecribellate orb spiders consists of glue droplets sitting astride a silk filament. Mechanically this thread presents a mixed solid-liquid behavior unknown to date.…
The assembly of colloids in nematic liquid crystals via topological defects has been extensively studied for spherical particles, and investigations of other colloid shapes have revealed a wide array of new assembly behaviors. We show,…
Self-assembly of nanoparticles can enable composites with pre-designed properties but remains challenged by reproducing structural diversity of atomic and molecular crystals. We combine anisotropic elastic and weakly screened electrostatic…
Understanding and controlling the director field configuration, shape, and orientation in nematic and cholesteric liquid crystals is of fundamental importance in several branches of science. Liquid crystalline droplets, also known as…
Spider dragline silk shows well-known outstanding mechanical properties. However, its sigmoidal shape of the measured stress-strain curves (i.e. the yield) can not be described by classical polymer theories and recent hierarchical chain…
Spider dragline silk is one of the toughest materials known and understanding the hierarchical structure is a critical component in the efforts to connect structure to function. In this paper, we take the first step in elucidating the…
Protein fibril accumulation at interfaces is an important step in many physiological processes and neurodegenerative diseases as well as in designing materials. Here we show, using $\beta$-lactoglobulin fibrils as a model, that semiflexible…
Physical properties of composite materials can be pre-engineered by controlling their structure and composition at the mesoscale. Yet, approaches for achieving this are limited and rarely scalable. We introduce a new breed of self-assembled…
The actin cytoskeleton is remarkably adaptable and multifunctional. It often organizes into nematic bundles such as contractile rings or stress fibers. However, how a uniform and isotropic actin gel self-organizes into dense nematic bundles…
Consider the (simplified) Leslie-Erickson model for the flow of nematic liquid crystals in a bounded domain $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^n$ for n > 1$. This article develops a complete dynamic theory for these equations, analyzing the system…
Ferroelectric nematic (NF) liquid crystals combine liquid-like fluidity and orientational order of conventional nematics with macroscopic electric polarization comparable in magnitude to solid state ferroelectric materials. Here, we present…
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…
Biological processes such as embryogenesis, wound healing and cancer progression, crucially rely on the ability of epithelial cells to coordinate their mechanical activity over length scales order of magnitudes larger than the typical…
We systematically explore the self-assembly of semi-flexible polymers in deformable spherical confinement across a wide regime of chain stiffness, contour lengths and packing fractions by means of coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
The spider silk is one of the most interesting bio-materials investigated in the last years. One of the main reasons that brought scientists to study this organized system is its high level of resistance if compared to other artificial…
There is increasing evidence that mammalian cells not only crawl on substrates but can also swim in fluids. To elucidate the mechanisms of the onset of motility of cells in suspension, a model which couples actin and myosin kinetics to…
In this paper, we investigate the density-dependent incompressible nematic liquid crystal flows in $n(n=2$ or $3)$ dimensional bounded domain. More precisely, we obtain the local existence and uniqueness of the solutions when the viscosity…
The nonlinear elastic properties of nematic liquid crystals have acquired new interest with the recent experimental observation of bulk modulated nematic phases which are composed by achiral molecules. We extend the Oseen-Zocher-Frank's…