Sharif Digital Repository

Nematic shells of liquid crystals have been provided in microscales. Defect structures in the shells are very essential in the electro-optical applications of such colloidal objects. We have numerically minimized the free energy of symmetric and asymmetric spherical shells of the nematic liquid crystal. Considering degenerate planar anchoring on the surfaces and isotropic nematic elasticity, a variety of defect structures are observed by controlling or varying the thicknesses of the shell and its degree of asymmetry. In symmetric shells, our calculations show that boojums (bipolar) defects appear in thick shells and tetrahedral (baseball) defects in thin shells. In asymmetric shells, while... 

The electrohydrodynamic (EHD) vortices produced by an electric current in freely suspended liquid crystal (LC) films of N-(4-methoxybenzylidene)-4- butylaniline (MBBA), convert to a pure rotation in the presence of external electric field (E ext) perpendicular to the current direction. Here, the direction and strength of the rotation are precisely under control by our self-made device called "liquid-film motor". In this paper, we present experimental observations of the EHD fluid flow when external electric field varies from zero to a value in which pure rotation on the liquid crystal (LC) film is observed. We also show experimentally that the presence of external electric field causes a... 

Fractals are remarkable examples of self-similarity where a structure or dynamic pattern is repeated over multiple spatial or time scales. However, little is known about how fractal stimuli such as fractal surfaces interact with their local environment if it exhibits order. Here we show geometry-induced formation of fractal defect states in Koch nematic colloids, exhibiting fractal self-similarity better than 90% over three orders of magnitude in the length scales, from micrometers to nanometres. We produce polymer Koch-shaped hollow colloidal prisms of three successive fractal iterations by direct laser writing, and characterize their coupling with the nematic by polarization microscopy and...