Autonomous materials systems from active liquid crystals

R Zhang, A Mozaffari, JJ de Pablo - Nature Reviews Materials, 2021 - nature.com
Liquid crystals (LCs) are ubiquitous in display technologies. The orientational ordering in the
nematic phase of LCs gives rise to structural anisotropy, the ability to form topological …

Equilibrium morphology of tactoids in elastically anisotropic nematics

CD Schimming, J Viñals - Soft Matter, 2022 - pubs.rsc.org
We study two dimensional tactoids in nematic liquid crystals by using a Q-tensor
representation. A bulk free energy of the Maier–Saupe form with eigenvalue constraints on …

Self-organization and shape change by active polarization in nematic droplets

FJ Schwarzendahl, P Ronceray, KL Weirich… - Physical Review …, 2021 - APS
Active forces drive critical biological processes such as spontaneous organization and
shape change during cell division. Here, we present a minimal hydrodynamic model leading …

Nonlinear Methods for Shape Optimization Problems in Liquid Crystal Tactoids

JH Adler, AS Andrei, TJ Atherton - arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.04022, 2023 - arxiv.org
Anisotropic fluids, such as nematic liquid crystals, can form non-spherical equilibrium
shapes known as tactoids. Predicting the shape of these structures as a function of material …

Theoretical and Computational Methods for Mesoscopic Textures in Nematic Liquid Crystals with Anisotropic Elasticity

CD Schimming - 2022 - search.proquest.com
Nematic liquid crystals are materials in which the underlying constituents are anisotropic
which, in turn, leads to anisotropic properties and response at the meso and macro scales …