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Motivated by recent experiments on the rod-like virus bacteriophage fd, confined to circular and annular domains, we present a theoretical study of structural transitions in these geometries. Using the continuum theory of nematic liquid crystals, we examine the competition between bulk elasticity and surface anchoring, mediated by the formation of topological defects. We show analytically that bulk defects are unstable with respect to defects sitting at the boundary. Moreover, in case of an annulus, whose topology does not require the presence of topological defects, under weak anchoring conditions we find that nematic textures with boundary defects are stable compared to the defect free configurations. Thus our simple approach, with no fitting parameters, suggests a possible symmetry breaking mechanism responsible for the formation of one-, two- and three-fold textures under annular confinement.
Transport of ions in molecular-scale confined spaces is central to all aspects of life and technology: into a crack, it may break steel within days; through a membrane separator, it determines the efficiency of electrochemical energy conversion devic
The Vicsek model (Vicsek et al. 1995) is a very popular minimalist model to study active matter with a number of applications to biological systems at different length scales. With its off-lattice implementation and the periodic boundary conditions,
We develop an energetic model that captures the twisting behavior of spindle-shaped polymer microparticles with nematic ordering, which display remarkably different twisting behavior to ordinary nematics confined to spindles. We have previously devel
We consider a two-dimensional gas of colliding charged particles confined to finite size containers of various geometries and subjected to a uniform orthogonal magnetic field. The gas spectral densities are characterized by a broad peak at the cyclot
We examine the scaling with activity of the emergent length scales that control the nonequilibrium dynamics of an active nematic liquid crystal, using two popular hydrodynamic models that have been employed in previous studies. In both models we find