We review the state of the art concerning drops and shells of liquid crystal. We especially
focus on the defect structures observed with liquid crystals with different degrees of order …

Orientational order, encoded in anisotropic fields, plays an important role during the
development of an organism. A striking example of this is the freshwater polyp Hydra, where …

When nematic liquid crystals are constrained to a curved surface, the geometry induces
distortions in the molecular orientation. The mechanisms of the geometrical frustration …

An experimental and theoretical study of lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals (LCLCs)
confined in cylinders with degenerate planar boundary conditions elucidates LCLC director …

Cell monolayers are a central model system in the study of tissue biophysics. In vivo,
epithelial tissues are curved on the scale of microns, and the curvature's role in the onset of …

We propose a continuum model to describe the molecular alignment in thin nematic shells.
By contrast with previous accounts, the two-dimensional free energy, aimed at describing …

The biological membrane, which compartmentalizes the cell and its organelles, exhibits
wide variety of macroscopic shapes of varying morphology and topology. A systematic …

We study, numerically and theoretically, defects in an anisotropic liquid that couple to the
extrinsic geometry of a surface. Though the intrinsic geometry tends to confine topological …

A variational scheme is proposed which allows the derivation of a concise and elegant
formulation of the equilibrium equations for closed fluid membranes, endowed with a …

Experimental data on thin films of cylinder-forming block copolymers (BC)—free-standing
BC membranes as well as supported BC films—strongly suggest that the local orientation of …