Theory and simulation of objects in liquid crystals

Abstract

Colloidal particles with anisotropic interactions are excellent candidates for synthetic building blocks of self-assembled materials with desirable properties, such as a photonic bandgap or swimming ability, at the nano-or micro-scale. The anisotropic nature of liquid crystals (LCs) makes them an ideal candidate to generate non-spherically symmetric interactions between immersed colloidal particles. Here, we review the progress on the theory and simulation of such systems.

Lattice Boltzmann Modeling of Cholesteric Liquid Crystal Droplets Under an Oscillatory Electric Field

“…Indeed, under confinement, the typical helical structure of the cholesteric may conflict with that imposed at the boundaries, often favouring the formation of topological defects (or disclinations) whose nature can decisively condition mechanical and optical properties of the liquid crystal [15,20,21]. While, over the years, considerable efforts have been addressed to theoretically investigate the physics of cholesteric droplets and their associated defect structure at equilibrium [15,16,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28], only recently a number of numerical works have been dedicated to pinpointing their response under an external driving, such as a heat flux [29] or an electric field [30,31]. Such works have been inspired by experiments showing for example that, if subject to a temperature gradient, cholesteric drops are set into rotation due to either a thermomechanical torque mechanism [32][33][34] or to Marangoni flows [29,35].…”