Sharif Digital Repository

Structure of colloidal particles in anisotropic solvent with long-range orientational ordering, such as nematic liquid crystals, has attracted great attention in science and technology. The nematic director is distorted from its uniform orientation in the bulk due to anchoring on the surface of the colloidal particles. These elastic distortions create topological defects around the particles and induce long and short range anisotropic interactions between the particles. Depending on the anchoring type and the colloidal geometry, the particle-defect can induce a long-range dipolar-dipolar, quadrupolar-quadrupolar and/or dipolar-quadrupolar potential.Experimentally, the colloidal interactions... 

Confining nematic liquid crystal between two curved boundary conditions while the nematic molecules have a degenerate planar anchoring leads to complex and beautiful textures of molecular disparagement(defect) in the bulk and on the surfaces. Such the liquid crystal shells are made with double-emulsion techniques in microfluidic devices have provided applications for micro-scale colloidal linkers.In this work, we have numerically minimized the elastic energy in one-constant approximation in present of Fournier’s degenerate surface potential with finite element method. The nematic shell is confined between two spherical surfaces that we have studied the final energies and their related...